Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects: American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940 9780520942356, 9780520237292

Citation preview

Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects

A H M A N S O N • M U R P H Y F I N E

A R T S

I M P R I N T

   has endowed this imprint to honor the memory of       

.

   

who for half a century served arts and letters, beauty and learning, in equal measure by shaping with a brilliant devotion those institutions upon which they rely.

PUBLISHED WITH THE ASSISTANCE OF THE GETTY FOUNDATION.

Dianne Sachko Macleod

ENCHANTED LIVES, ENCHANTED OBJECTS

Y American Women Collectors and the Making of Culture, 1800–1940

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS BERKELEY

•

LOS ANGELES

•

LONDON

University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advancing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Berkeley and Los Angeles, California University of California Press, Ltd. London, England © 2008 by The Regents of the University of California Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Macleod, Dianne Sachko. Enchanted lives, enchanted objects : American women collectors and the making of culture, 1800–1940 / Dianne Sachko Macleod. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-520-23729-2 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Women art collectors—United States—History—19th century. 2. Women art collectors—United States—History—20th century. I. Title. N5215.M33 2008 704'.0420973—dc22

2008010425

Manufactured in Canada 17 10

16 15 14 13 12 9 8 7 6 5 4

11 10 09 3 2 1

08

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of ansi/niso z39.48-1992 (r 1997) (Permanence of Paper).

TO PEARL BELYK SACHKO, AN INDEPENDENT WOMAN

IT IS THE SPECTATOR, AND NOT LIFE, THAT ART REALLY MIRRORS. —OSCAR WILDE, PREFACE TO THE PICTURE OF DORIAN GRAY

Contents

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

/ xi

Introduction: Women Art Collectors /

1

LUXURY OR NECESSITY ?

1. The Politics of Cultural Space in Antebellum America / ELIZA BOWEN JUMEL ELIZABETH HART JARVIS COLT •

•

2. A Conspiracy of Silence / MARY SEXTON MORGAN ANNA BRECK ASPINWALL

•

ANNA WILSTACH

•

CATHARINE LORILLARD WOLFE

•

21

MARY TELFAIR

45

MARIETTA REED STEVENS

ABIGAIL WHEATLEY BLODGETT • CORNELIA CLINCH STEWART •

ALICE STURGIS HOOPER

•

PAULINE AGASSIZ SHAW

SUSAN CLARKE WARREN • ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER

3. Art and Activism /

93

PHOEBE APPERSON HEARST • MARY ANN DEMING CROCKER BERTHA HONORÉ PALMER

•

•

JANE LATHROP STANFORD

ALVA SMITH VANDERBILT • LOUISINE ELDER HAVEMEYER

4. The Gendering of the Modern Museum / ELEANOR AND SARAH HEWITT MAUD DALE

•

•

134

AGNES ERNST MEYER KATHERINE DREIER •

ABIGAIL ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER

•

LILLIE BLISS • MARY QUINN SULLIVAN

HILLA REBAY • GERTRUDE VANDERBILT WHITNEY

5. The Sexing of Taste /

176

GERTRUDE AND LEO STEIN • MABEL DODGE • ETTA AND CLARIBEL CONE EMILY CRANE CHADBOURNE

Epilogue: Modernist Nostalgia / EDITH ROCKEFELLER MCCORMICK

•

206

MARY HOPKINS EMERY • MABEL DODGE

MARION KOOGLER MCNAY

NOTES /

223

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS / INDEX /

293

285

Acknowledgments

W

HY ARE THERE SO FEW WOMEN ART COLLECTORS? I have puzzled over this enigmatic question for fifteen years. It first occurred to me while I was researching an earlier book, about the surprisingly large number of British businessmen in the Victorian period who managed to squeeze art collecting into their hectic schedules. Surely, I reasoned, they must have been aided and abetted by their wives. Yet their spouses’ names never appeared in artists’ sales books or dealers’ records, for the simple reason that the law did not allow married women to have bank accounts or to sign checks. British women had no control over property, even their own, until 1882. Yet there was no doubt in my mind that these hidden helpers had a good deal to say about what art was brought into their domestic domains. Frustrated by attempts to locate documentation in the art world, I turned instead to the private correspondence of individual collectors, where, indeed, I found evidence of the active involvement of English women in art collecting.1 Having confirmed my suspicions, I set out to write a book about British, French, and American women collectors. I quickly learned, however, that American women won access to their own property much earlier than their European counterparts. Not only did money make it possible for them to become collectors sooner, but they embraced this activity in greater numbers. Listening to the swelling chorus of voices emerging from my archive, I decided to tell their story first. Wanda Corn first introduced me to the wonders of American art in a course she taught at the University of California at Berkeley while I was in graduate school. She has continued to provide a model of rigorous scholarship and exquisite writing. I am now also

xi

indebted to my own graduate students, especially Julia Armstrong, Tirza Latimer, and Catherine Anderson, as well as those students beyond Art History, in Cultural Studies, English, and Women and Gender Studies, whose discussions across the seminar table have nudged me along paths I never would have traveled without their enthusiasm and curiosity. Their dedication to the art object and critical theory guided my walk across the tightrope that joins them. Over the years, others have provided timely research assistance, including Ann Baldoni, Sarah Bermingham, Anneke Voorhees, and Darcy Dapra, while the inestimable Leah Theis has rescued me on several occasions with her knowledge of visual resources. Research grants provided by the University of California at Davis also helped launch this project. Former dean Elizabeth Langland not only authorized a publication assistance grant, but also shared my enthusiasm for the nineteenth century. I owe a special debt of gratitude to Deborah Kirshman, my sponsoring editor at the University of California Press. She and the other wonderful staª members of the Press inspired me by their professional code of excellence. This book would not have reached completion without my son Alexander’s patient advice on all points concerning computer technology or my husband Norman’s sustaining wit and humor.

xii

•

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INTRODUCTION

Y Women Art Collectors LUXURY OR NECESSITY ?

C

OLLECTING HAD A LIBERATING EFFECT on a›uent American women, beginning in the antebellum period and continuing through the transitional Gilded Age into the Progressive Era. The intimate contemplation of art empowered many women and led to their active involvement in shaping American cultural and political life. By unleashing their creativity in the home, by venturing forth to art exhibitions and galleries, and, most of all, by joining forces with other civic-minded women and, ultimately, donating their collections to the public and founding museums, they changed the face of their communities. The president of the Chicago Woman’s Club commented on this evolution when she declared in 1910: “The home is the center of life, and if we can take art into the homes and then through the homes into the neighborhood, and then from one neighborhood into another, we shall soon make our whole city beautiful.”1 More than a few women took a further step when they enlisted the art objects that had induced them out of their gilded cages to advance the cause of women’s suªrage. Although this movement from domestic enrichment to public involvement took place throughout the United States, neither its origins in art collecting nor the extent of its reach has been documented. Even in New York scant attention has been paid to the fact that four of the city’s major museums were spearheaded by women: the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, and the Cooper-Hewitt Museum. Nor has this chain of female enterprise been related to dozens of other museums scattered across the country, from Oregon to upstate New York, or to the museums-without-walls that women designed for fairs, international expositions, and charitable benefits. 1

Collecting has recently excited interest across the disciplines of sociology, anthropology, and both psychology and psychiatry.2 Scholars of consumer research and American studies have also begun to explore the relationship between collecting and gender, while historians have traced the extension of women’s domestic role from consolidating the cultural capital of the home to participating in charitable societies and campaigning for the vote.3 Art historians, for their part, have only recently begun to see how closely linked the world of women’s privatized aesthetic pleasure was to the worlds of commerce and public duty. Even though Aline Saarinen includes a few women in her groundbreaking study of American patronage, The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times and Tastes of Some Adventurous American Collectors (1958), her fascinating vignettes do not link her subjects to the unfolding saga of women’s increasing influence in the public sphere. That challenge was admirably met by Kathleen McCarthy, who situated women’s involvement in the arts in a wider historical context in Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (1991).4 Benefiting but diªering from what has been published so far, my book asks why the collecting of precious objects became such a significant feature in the lives of American women. My interest lies in the psychological attachment to art that spurred women to explore their dreams and fantasies and ultimately ushered them out of the home into the realm of social, political, and cultural activity. In the process of changing themselves, they changed their worlds. My emphasis on motivations for collecting art and the liberating eªect it had on elite women necessarily limits the range of this book. It does not pretend to address every facet of American women’s collecting, or present a broad survey of the decorative and fine arts, or oªer a comparison between American and European taste. In restricting the scope of this book to the important role art objects played in the lives of elite American women, I am responding to a lacuna that has been identified by seasoned scholars such as Jules Prown, who notes that “American scholars have not been particularly interested in identifying or understanding the most fundamental relationship between people and objects. Attempts to seek those understandings may completely reshape the field.”5 While I do not claim to have achieved that grand goal, I oªer here a preliminary analysis of women’s enchantment with objects. I leave it to future scholars to fill in the blanks. I have adopted the case study method in order to provide concrete examples rather than sweeping generalizations. My study is structured chronologically, beginning in 1800 with Eliza Bowen Jumel, the first American woman to gather and display a major art collection, and concludes in the 1930s, when the Great Depression set in motion the forces that ended Edith Rockefeller McCormick’s plans for a utopian community. Each chapter focuses on individuals who represent a significant phase in the making of American culture. Because my intention is not to make my subjects heroic or to create a canon of exceptional women collectors, I have expanded my discussion to include additional individuals who influenced their views, shared their values, or challenged their judgment. Rather than focusing on familiar women collectors about whom books have already been written, such as Marjorie Merriweather Post and Peggy Guggenheim, my discussion cen-

2

•

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

ters on comparatively unknown figures like Mary Sexton Morgan and Phoebe Apperson Hearst.6 Some readers are bound to be disappointed not to find their favorite collector in these pages. It was di‹cult to eliminate such imaginative women as Alice Warder Garrett and Mona Williams Bismarck, but I found it necessary to cull my roster to listen more closely to the stories of those whose collecting patterns either defied existing expectations or enriched lives beyond their own at strategic moments in our country’s cultural history. Although the time frame covered in this book extends over 140 years, the issues that aªected women collectors remained fairly constant during that period. Six overarching themes run through each chapter, from the private role of collecting in attaining psychic release, fostering individuation, and engineering empowerment, to the gendering of American culture that resulted after women intervened in public life and clamored for full citizenship. My goal is to expand our knowledge of how individual women managed to negotiate, mediate, and in some case even circumvent systems of power and thus brought about a gendering of cultural codes. To that end, I am more concerned with analyzing the implications of the practice of collecting than providing a compendium of female collectors or itemizing the contents of their collections in detail. Art objects, however, form the core of this study. Women’s attraction to objects that invited touching, such as sleek jade carvings, creamy porcelain urns, lustrous glass bowls, satiny ivory figurines, and nubby textiles, allowed them to soar above the concerns of their everyday lives and initiate a process of self-actualization. The interior designer Candace Wheeler recognized the beneficial spell cast by objects in 1893 when she identified “a mysterious charm, a nameless something, an attractive ghost of harmony and tranquility, a spirit which diªused contentment and quiet happiness” in tastefully decorated rooms.7 I argue that the muted dialectic between women and their prized possessions furthered their development as autonomous individuals and sparked a dynamic charge that propelled them out of their cloistered interiors into an engagement with public life. Any narrative reflects the personal agenda of its compiler. I confess that I searched for women who viewed the practice of collecting as an entrée into the wider world of decision making and independence. I discovered them in the rosters of arts organizations and museum donor files, in the archives of historical societies and regional libraries, and in histories of voluntary associations and the women’s suªrage movement. While it was more di‹cult to trace less public figures in standard scholarly sources, I found that their habits and possessions were often vividly described by observers of the social scene.8 I also located descriptions of women collectors in histories of fashion and interior decoration. Their presence within these histories and in the popular press has been a mixed blessing, however: on the one hand, it has prevented some women collectors from sinking into oblivion, but on the other, it has helped to perpetuate the historical denigration of the woman collector as a superficial consumer of frivolous objects. An 1886 article in the Sun, for instance, paints Mary Morgan as psychologically unbalanced because she spent extravagant amounts of money on art.9 In the period I discuss, although the American woman was charged with representing her family’s social status and material cul-

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

•

3

ture through the consumption of goods for the home, she was expected to maintain a low profile and conform to the male ideal of rational acquisition.10 The subjects of this book are wealthy women who challenged the economic imperatives and codified conduct of patriarchal society. Surprisingly, there has been a paucity of research in the area of elite culture. Lois Rudnick recalls that when she was investigating the life of Mabel Dodge, she was hampered by the lack of scholarship on upper-class life, despite its “rich and complex dimensions,” which call out for further exploration by “social and cultural historians as well as by biographers.” The historian Nancy Hewitt proªers another compelling reason for studying elite women when she proposes that a “trickle down analysis” can oªer a framework for understanding the experiences of all women.11 No one more clearly illustrates this point than Edith Rockefeller McCormick. Instead of feeling guilty about her wealth, she defiantly defended her lavish lifestyle in a newspaper interview conducted during the depths of the Depression. A student of history, McCormick justified her behavior by referring to a fundamental principle of political economy, which maintains that the spending of the rich keeps the poor gainfully employed.12 Her less obvious psychological reasons for surrounding herself with expensive objects speak to the heart of this study: McCormick endured a debilitating neurosis until she entered treatment in Switzerland with the psychoanalyst Carl Jung, who validated her propensity for dreaming over her possessions.13 Moneyed women like McCormick demonstrated on a grand scale that it is possible to find solace in one’s living space and make it express the deepest needs of the spirit. Like less privileged women, the rich experienced disappointments, personal losses, and feelings of inadequacy. They endured enormous social pressure against remaining single, marrying whom they chose, or entering into same-sex relationships. Though money made it possible for them to fulfill their wildest dreams, in other words, it did not shield them from life’s traumas. Yet the women in this book refused to fade, wisplike, into the woodwork and discovered that aesthetic contemplation could lead to a more positive sense of self. Shielded from male scrutiny during this process, they mustered the insight and confidence to lead more productive lives. I do not intend to treat the terms “male” and “female” as fixed categories. Although I frequently make recourse to gender distinctions, my usage is tied to the ways these diªerences were defined, amended, and subverted during the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Gender studies has recently emerged as an interdisciplinary field made up of scholars of feminism, masculinity, queer studies, and sexuality, who argue that gender is not static, but is socially and historically constructed in ways that crosscut biological boundaries.14 Both men and women occupy overlapping subject positions that intersect to various degrees due to the complexities of sex roles at any given moment, resulting in a “gendering” of outlooks. “Gendering,” according to masculinity researcher Michael Kimmel, “is the process by which identities are pieced together by active subjects from the materials—objects, ideals, people, at hand.”15 I use that term to describe both women’s moderating influence on male collecting practices and culture at large,

4

•

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

as well as to illustrate the ways that they were, in turn, aªected by dominant male values. Gendering, in other words, is a two-way, reciprocal process. Just as some men embraced a female sensibility when they encountered the curative properties of objets d’art, so did women adopt traditionally masculine characteristics, such as aggressive bargaining and deal-making, after they ventured into the art market. Gertrude Stein went further when she identified herself with male creative geniuses, in contrast to her brother Leo, who developed an aesthetic philosophy based on a feminine empathy for the decorative arts. The gendering of collecting, however, was mutable and unsystematic. Some women were particularly sheltered and more reluctant to unravel the ties that bound them to the conventional expectations of their sex; others viewed objects as liberating vehicles on the route to female emancipation. These latter women moved away from the narrowly defined spaces of the luxurious interiors they were bred to inhabit in the Gilded Age, toward wide-open exterior spaces marked by the fresher possibilities of civic involvement. They quickly matched male practices and initiated a gendering of sensibilities when they became active agents in the field of cultural production. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe and Phoebe Hearst underwent yet another regendering experience when they created art-filled country retreats where they could release tension after expending energy on their business and philanthropic pursuits. These variations underline the fact that gender is a fluid, unstable, and socially contingent category. Woman’s subjectivity is likewise molded by historical and situational circumstances. Like gender, identity shifts and mutates in response to individual life experiences. Not only did the women collectors in this book diªer widely in their education, marital status, ambition, and psychological needs, but their characters went through many permutations as they experimented with diªerent roles. From the perspective of the “new biography,” Jo Burr Margadant wisely cautions that the historical subject is not a coherent self, but “an individual with multiple selves whose diªerent manifestations reflect the passage of time, [and] the demands and options of diªerent settings.”16 Both historical context and biography, then, are crucial to an understanding of the art collecting of women whose outlooks were shaped by the patriarchal structure of American society, but whose subjectivities were modified by their own circumstances and desires. Individually and collectively, women aªected the fragmented pattern of cultural life in America. Because they were trailblazers without maps, their imprints are sporadic rather than continuous, their paths often interrupted by shattered plans and unrealized ambitions. Some women were sidetracked by criticism from male mentors who begrudged them their growing independence. Agnes Meyer ran afoul of Alfred Stieglitz when she opened a gallery in competition with his. Similarly, Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller, the leader of the female founders of the Museum of Modern Art, turned the reins of the organization over to a team of men when she sensed resentment brewing over women’s cultural prominence.17 Despite these setbacks, women left an indelible mark on the American scene: they pioneered the mining of untapped resources and staked a claim to the ownership of cultural property.

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

•

5

My project necessitates the redefinition of collecting from a female perspective. The etymology of the word “collection” is relatively neutral, stemming from the Latin colligere— to bring together or to gather.18 But its interpretations are not so neutral. John La Farge represented the majority opinion when he authoritatively stated in 1907 that true collectors were “owners of things gathered according to certain rules or sequences.”19 This conception of the collector as a calculating strategist who rationally chooses art objects in an orderly fashion has impeded an appreciation of the woman collector. Even scholars who are sensitive to the diªerences between the ways in which men and women pursue and display objects nevertheless conclude that, overall, “collecting is an ordering, sensemaking, modernistic pursuit.”20 This teleological view of collecting as a premeditated process of selection, classification, and categorization is the antithesis of the more intimate, subjective, and impromptu relationship that existed between women and things in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Childe Hassam captured this a‹nity in his painting The Room of Flowers (1894, plate 1), which represents two women so deeply imbedded in their milieu that it is nearly impossible to distinguish their tousled heads from the profusion of casually placed collectibles scattered around the comfortable room.21 This image illustrates my contention that women perceived their immediate environments as extensions of themselves. This symbiotic relationship between owners and things accounts for women’s partiality for the so-called minor arts—porcelain, glassware, embroidery, carpets, lace—and explains, in part, why they have not been taken more seriously as collectors. Scholars of American domestic material culture have noted the derogatory meanings attached to the decorative arts, pointedly arguing that the term “‘decorative arts’ is both pejorative and misleading—pejorative because it subordinates groups of objects to the ‘real’ arts of painting, sculpture, and architecture and misleading because it indicates that their primary function is decorative.”22 Wendy Steiner attributes this bias to women’s socially constructed role as pleasure givers. She comments: Throughout aesthetic history, women and ornament have functioned as analogues. Women wear ornaments (more consistently than men), and have been considered for better or for worse, ornaments to society and the home. Ornaments epitomize the aesthetic; their primary function is to be beautiful in themselves and so to add beauty to the larger wholes in which they figure. Thus the aesthetic symbolism of ornament involves a gesture of “pleasing,” an openness of appeal that is conventionally gendered feminine.23

Accordingly, the assorted decorative objects that were scattered throughout the home trivialized their owners and disqualified them from the standard male definition of the collector as one who pursues a logical progression of values in a rationally conceived plan. Moreover, women’s partiality for handcrafted objects represented an anti-industrial trend that ran counter to the modernist enterprise championed by the leading businessmen who collected the fine arts.

6

•

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

Stigmatizing women as frivolous consumers reflected the deeply embedded ambivalence toward luxury that had existed from the earliest days of the new republic, when luxurious objects seemed redolent of a leisured British lifestyle.24 John Adams expressed the prevailing attitude in 1780, when he cautioned: “It is not indeed the fine Arts which our country requires. The Useful, the mechanic Arts, are those which We have occasion for in a young Country, as yet simple and not far advanced in Luxury, although perhaps much too far for her Age and Character.”25 Suspicious of the aristocratic underpinnings represented by the ownership of fine arts and sumptuous objects, Adams balked at the arguments of eighteenth-century political economists who recognized that consumption was a boon to the economy and rationalized luxury in relative terms, claiming that it could be considered a necessity in certain contexts. The priority Adams placed on public utility over private desires was not shared by all of his fellow citizens, however. Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jeªerson both enjoyed living with the finely crafted objects they had discovered while representing their country in France, and Franklin, writing to the philosopher Henry Home, Lord Kames, in 1768, endorsed Kames’s attitude toward the necessity of domestic comfort.26 Beyond the matter of material comfort, the debate over luxury pitted a conservative sense of self against the more liberating possibilities of possessive individualism embedded in the emerging market economy. Even Adams could not deny that a flourishing financial system was necessary for America’s survival as an independent country. If the health of the new nation depended on the production and selling of goods, how could the consumption of luxury objects continue to be castigated? Rationalists found a way to circumvent the impasse by euphemistically substituting “comfort” and “refinement” for the more palatial concept of luxury. The historian Richard Bushman concludes in his study of early American material culture that “refinement oªered a set of countervailing values to oªset the injunctions against luxury, so that capitalism and gentility came to reinforce one another.”27 Rooted in aristocratic genteel society, refinement was somewhat at odds with the American egalitarian ideal of culture. However, whereas culture came to be linked to social progress and outward display—the importance of culture as an expression of American national identity would continue to be vigorously debated for years—comfort became tied to domesticity and moderation and was quickly legitimated by political economists as the right and privilege of all.28 In a society undergoing rapid change, this provided the intellectual justification for the production and consumption of clothes, furniture, and art objects. Scholars of the early American period confess that very little is known about antebellum consumption. Preliminary research, however, suggests that a growing consumer culture oªered an opportunity for self-invention and played into the formation of gender categories.29 The prevailing view of collecting has led to a misconception of American material culture, one that ignores the matrix of values that women placed on the domestic objects they collected. Even though women were designated as consumers for the home, their system of valuation prized psychological comfort over market value. Maud Cooke com-

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

•

7

1. Music room, Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, Phoebe Apperson Hearst residence, Pleasanton, California, c. 1903–4. From Barr Ferree, American Estates and Gardens (New York: Munn and Company, 1904), 211.

mented on this phenomenon in 1896: “It is largely to women with their leisure, and their tact, that we must look to create and sustain the social fabric.”30 Their engagement with enchanted objects was more than a self-indulgent preoccupation: it gave them the confidence to become more involved in the world at large. Employing an interdisciplinary approach, I draw on psychoanalytical, philosophical, and literary theories to demonstrate that women collectors, beginning in the antebellum period and continuing through the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, perceived interior space as a central structure in the psychological landscapes of their lives and valued the aesthetic commodities they placed in this space more for their intrinsic “use value” than for their “exchange value” or extrinsic worth as signifiers of luxury.31 Because women expected the items they collected to serve a personal function, they were less aªected by the impersonal valuation system of the marketplace. Although they patriotically carried out the nationalist agenda of expressing American abundance through the acquisition of goods, they reverted to a preindustrial notion of value once they installed these objects in their homes, where they viewed them as necessities rather than commodities. Bill Brown writes of the complexity of “things,” which, once they are removed from the market and become possessions, resist commodification in a way that is “irreducible to ownership.”32

8

•

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

2. Picture gallery, William H. Vanderbilt residence, New York, 1883. From Earl Shinn, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (Boston: George Barrie, 1883–84), 2:x.

Nor is there a trace among the women collectors of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries of the tendency to grant art the nonutilitarian “sacred status” assigned by those male collectors who removed precious objects from use. Claribel Cone was startled by people who referred to her assemblage of paintings, ivories, and textiles as a “collection.”33 Her view of collectibles was more personal, pragmatic, and quotidian. Another case in point is the intimate and expressive environment favored by Phoebe Hearst (fig. 1), in stark contrast to the impersonal display of William H. Vanderbilt’s collection (fig. 2). In her music room at Hacienda del Pozo de Verona in Pleasanton, California, as in her library and drawing room, Hearst blended together tapestries, textiles, ceramics, and various objets d’art with paintings to create an independent work of art, creating a three-dimensional eªect, as richly worked as brocade, that makes Vanderbilt’s gallery look flat and hard-edged by comparison. Hearst vigorously championed the decorative arts and, as I shall discuss, enlisted leading scholars to support her cause. Vanderbilt, on the other hand, followed the rational principles of selection and classification described by La Farge. He savored his paintings and sculptures as representatives of the higher arts and segregated them from the decorative arts in his New York mansion. He adopted the “picturesque or decorative hang” initiated by European museums in the eigh-

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

•

9

teenth century, signaling his awareness of well-established museological practices.34 Paintings were grouped according to size and subject and hung in a repeating pattern of symmetrically arranged pairs, all arranged in an uncluttered and untextured environment that did not invite the tactile examination or spontaneous rearrangement characterizing Hearst’s approach. Those who were admitted to Vanderbilt’s gallery—which was open to the public every Thursday and accessed through its own separate entrance—would have recognized the Cartesian qualities that distinguished him as a businessman in the logical arrangement of his art collection. His motives for collecting were tied to his worldly aspiration to be perceived as a reasonable and sensible member of New York’s aristocracy of wealth.35 Whereas Vanderbilt’s assemblage of goods satisfies the mainstream definition of a collection, the miscellaneous objects in Hearst’s music room do not. Rather, her method of display illustrates Bjarne Rogan’s contention that the concept of the series as the bedrock of collections should be replaced with the notion of the ensemble to accommodate women’s propensity for the decorative arts.36 Although private picture galleries in homes were the rage among American millionaires, Hearst chose not to add one when she commissioned the architect Julia Morgan to expand the size of her hacienda to ninety-two rooms.37 Hearst’s dispersal of her collection throughout her home ran counter to the public-oriented presentation of Vanderbilt’s, illustrating a fundamental distinction between a masculine “focused attachment typical of collecting rather than the more diªuse absorption implied by the feminine metaphor of incorporation.”38 It was important to women like Hearst to weave artworks into the fabric of the home to comfort them, satisfy their fantasies, and allow them to express their self-identity. I am not claiming that men were entirely uninterested in the decorative arts. Their motives for acquiring them, however, were more public than private until the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Striving to convey a positive image to the world, wealthy males bought ornaments for a variety of reasons, ranging from a desire to emulate the opulent, cosmopolitan appearance of the aristocratic collections they saw on their European travels, to a wish to display luxurious objects that signaled success in their business ventures.39 A masculine emotional engagement with objets d’art did not become a discernible pattern until the pressures of urban life induced men to retreat into the home and seek solace from its mollifying décor. I investigated this phenomenon, which first occurred in England in the 1860s, in my previous book about British art collectors, explaining that the toll taken by the Industrial Revolution manifested itself in disillusionment with the cult of progress, urban malaise, and nervous disorders.40 Delayed by the outbreak of the Civil War, the eªects of America’s manufacturing and commercial growth did not become apparent until the last decades of the nineteenth century. Advice manuals began to appear, recommending the healing properties of tasteful objects to worldweary businessmen.41 Sensitivity toward beautiful objects was sanctioned by the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements, which were fostered in the United States by transatlantic purveyors of taste, including James Abbott McNeill Whistler, William Morris, Walter

10

•

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

Crane, and Oscar Wilde.42 Some of America’s legendary tycoons, including J. P. Morgan and John Rockefeller Jr., found comfort in handling beautifully crafted objects during stressful periods in their lives. These men demonstrated a gendering of taste when they opted to live in close proximity to the decorative arts and mingled them with their fine arts rather than displaying them in separate rooms. The wider acceptance of the decorative arts was in large part due to the female consumer. Inspired by the displays of tapestries, ceramics, glassware, and other art objects in the women’s buildings at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 and World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, women searched for commercial outlets. Their patronage was eagerly sought by dealers, artists, and commercial emporiums. Samuel Avery, for instance, expanded his gallery’s repertoire beyond paintings to include the decorative arts, and staged previews exclusively for women clients. Artists such as William Merritt Chase imported oriental carpets, wall hangings, carved furniture, candlesticks, glazed porcelain, and other artifacts into their studios, transforming them into cozy, domesticated boutiques where female “cultural shoppers” would feel at home.43 That women were empowered by the act of consumption in the buoyant post–Civil War economy, which subsequently launched America’s “age of excess,” is well known; their participation in the unfolding of capitalism has been the subject of several studies.44 These studies show that while housewives were expected to become visible trophies of male achievement, their role was far from passive. Rather, they were active agents who viewed the collecting of luxury goods as a means to construct and enact independent identities.45 William Leach notes that the arrival of women in commodity culture presented “a new definition of gender that carved out a space for individual expression similar to men’s.”46 Their involvement in the marketplace made it more di‹cult to justify their longstanding subordination in the capitalist economy. Women’s role as consumers allowed them to intervene in the male discourse of possessive individualism, which was based on the assumption that one can and should freely participate in the economic markets that are crucial to the survival of a flourishing financial system.47 But the inherent promise of self-invention contained within this relationship both pleased and alarmed economic mandarins. Although women’s domestic consumption contributed to the growth of laissez-faire capitalism, it opened the door to the realization that individual liberty depended on ownership of the self. This concept, of course, reflected a masculine selfhood that excluded women by virtue of their political disenfranchisement. The freedom aªorded by consumption challenged that assumption, and as women exercised the privileges of possessive individualism, they went on to claim the right to full citizenship. Alva Smith Vanderbilt, Louisine Elder Havemeyer, and Phoebe Hearst made a seamless transition from shopping for art objects for the home to applying their visual skills in promoting the suªrage campaign. But before they took that step, they paused and reflected on the objects they imported into their private spaces, which aided them in the process of individuation and self-actualization. A review of a spate of

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

•

11

recent books on the topic of women’s involvement in consumer culture concludes that “women invested goods with meaning, gave structure and voice to their own identities, and reshaped the world around them.”48 Nonetheless, whether women should be lapidary or economical was vigorously debated in the Gilded Age. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for one, explored both sides of the argument in her novels and short stories. She initially adopted a compromise position in which she drew a distinction between fashionable items and household possessions. To assuage her Protestant conscience, Stowe “purified” those goods that were objects of sentimental value and regular use in the home. Gillian Brown contends that, to Stowe, “use signifies an intimacy between persons and their possessions . . . [and] the service and notarization familiar things perform make the diªerence between a house and a home, a commodity and a possession.”49 But after observing the emancipatory role that prized possessions had come to play in women’s lives, Stowe expanded her point of view in her New York novels of the 1870s, in which she presents a sympathetic portrayal of the character Eva van Arsdel. Eva represents the post–Civil War female consumer, for whom luxury items are indispensable for personal development.50 Not all observers of the cultural scene were as approving as Stowe, however. The female consumer of “nonessential” objects was caricatured in the illustration “Collecting Mania,” published in Lippincott’s Magazine in 1882 (fig. 3). Its six scenes contrast female and male attitudes toward collectibles and ridicule the woman collector. In the top row, we see two children—a little girl who is said to possess “an innocent love of cards” and a young boy who is described as indulging in an “ardent pursuit of stamps.” This characterization is revealing, not just in the way it typecasts these young collectors according to their sex, but also because it assigns psychological motivations to them. While the young boy carefully and seriously scrutinizes the stamp he has removed from the discarded envelope, the little girl casually and playfully tosses her cards on the floor, in a manner that seems to reinforce the distinction between the irrational female and rational male collector. From a psychological standpoint, though, the little girl’s behavior is not impetuous, but indicative of an important stage in female individuation. Psychoanalysts contend that we often turn to objects to resolve issues during the struggle between dependency and autonomy. Melanie Klein believed that the search for new objects—in the form of things as well as people—helped diminish the internal tension and conflicts that arise during the maturation process.51 Objects, in other words, become a substitute for relations with others. D. W. Winnicott argues that “transitional objects” are crucial to the formation of a distinct sense of self. In contrast to Freud’s drive theory, which writers such as Jean Baudrillard have used to insist that collecting is a dark art that springs from the anal-erotic impulse of the libido, Winnicott’s concept of transitional phenomena situates our relationship with possessions in a positive light.52 More important for my purposes in identifying the motivations of collectors, Winnicott applies his object-relations theory to the art world. Although he developed his hypothesis to describe

12

•

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

3. “Collecting Mania,” Lippincott’s Magazine, 29 (January 1882), 112.

the teddy bears and blankets favored by infants who feel compelled to console themselves in their mother’s absence, Winnicott specifically states that this beneficial experience is retained throughout life “in the intense experiencing that belongs to the arts.” He adds that “the place where cultural experience is located is in the potential space between the individual and the environment.”53 It is in this space between dream and reality where objects can spark creativity by allowing the imagination to run free. Elaborating on this concept, Winnicott introduces his theory of creative play, which, when applied to art collecting, throws a new light on the important role of objects in the fantasy lives of their owners. He explains: There is a direct development from transitional phenomena to playing, and from playing to shared playing, and from this to cultural experiences. . . . It is in playing and only in playing that the individual child or adult is able to be creative and to use the whole personality, and it is only in being creative that the individual discovers the self.54

Following this line of reasoning, one can easily imagine the little card player of Lippincott’s as a grown woman reenacting the habit she enjoyed as a child when trying to fathom the world around her in later life. The act of playing and dreaming over her possessions would have continued to be an important aspect of her imaginary life, much like the figure in Whistler’s Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks (fig. 4), who slips into a reverie while fondling a blue-and-white porcelain vase. As one of the founders of the Aesthetic movement and a keen observer of women, Whistler understood that women esteemed well-made and attractive objects equally, if not more than, two-dimensional paintings and drawings, which were not as tactile or as easy to rearrange in groupings, an act that aªorded their owners a creative outlet. Mary Morgan was said to keep her porcelain and jade near her so that she could constantly touch and rearrange her “toys.”55 This form of collecting-as-play continued to be enacted by early-twentieth-century women. Gertrude Bass Warner, a formidable collector of Asian art who first ventured to China in 1904 and returned to endow the museum at the University of Oregon in Eugene, confessed: “In my house in Shanghai and later in San Francisco, I had what I called my play room, where I had many of my treasures and where I invited my friends who were interested in Chinese art to come and play with me.” Similarly, Mabel Dodge referred to her villa in Florence as her “play-house,” and Abby Rockefeller transformed her children’s former playroom into an adult play space where she interacted with her collection.56 These collectors and many more women like them found a creative release in touching, stroking, and fantasizing over objects that had a special meaning for them. Lost in a process they had first experienced with childhood comforters and toys, they transcended the mundane and reached a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in life. Theirs was not a frivolous kind of play, but a ritualistic “deep play” that allows the mind to migrate into an imaginary realm with limitless possibilities.57 Commenting on the therapeutic benefits of play continuing after childhood, the psychiatrist Hans Loewald asserts:

14

•

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

4. James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, 1864, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917.

In the healthier adult, communication and interplay between imagination and rationality remain alive. . . . play or drama and actual life share reality. . . . a great play may tap deeper sources of reality and meaning than the sober relationship of the workaday world alone can call forth.58

In this context, I am suggesting that the objets d’art treasured by women whose lives were circumscribed by social conventions can be considered extensions of the early soothers described by Winnicott and subsequent theorists. I am proposing that art collecting as practiced by women should be redefined as a process of gathering objects that console the psyche and contribute to the articulation of the self. Mabel Dodge frequently

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

•

15

reflected on the meaning of her relationship with beautiful things in the pages of her four-volume autobiography, concluding that she had “a knack at using things to make a life with them.”59 Collectibles, in addition to their roles as comforters and playful catalysts for the imagination, aided women like her in the process of discovering the diªerent facets of their identities. While the leisured collectors of costly commodities in this book could aªord to let their imaginations run free, the need to entertain fantasies and desires was common to all women. Returning to the Lippincott’s illustration, however, we find yet more negative characterizations of women’s collecting. In the middle row, a ladylike autograph collector is made fun of for her ineªectual hero worship and her uncharacteristically bold pursuit of her objective. Next to her, a female porcelain collector’s tactile engagement with a china plate also becomes a subject of amusement when the focus of her gaze is demeaned as “the sweetest thing in old china.” Chinese porcelain was considered hideous by male arbiters of taste, according to Craig Clunas, who persuasively argues that the women who collected Asian objets d’art were doubly marginalized, because China was fixed in the male mind as a feminine, exotic “other” and those who expressed a desire for its products were viewed as equally strange and irrational.60 Therefore the man at the lower left is mocked as a collector of bric-a-brac because he has acquired Asian porcelain for his cluttered interior. (The image recalls Charles Lamb’s confession that he had “an almost feminine partiality for old china.”61) Although fine Asian porcelain came to be prized after it was stamped with the imprimatur of good taste by artists and collectors associated with the Aesthetic movement, the chinaware belonging to the Lippincott’s collector is almost lost among a hodgepodge of paintings, prints, sculpture, weaponry, and miscellaneous cultural artifacts. He thus demonstrates an unmanly predilection for what Edmond de Goncourt referred to as “bricabracomania,” which Max Nordau would stigmatize as a pathology in his book Degeneration (1893).62 These assessments are symptomatic of a male backlash to the perceived feminization of culture, beginning in the Gilded Age and continuing into the twentieth century. It was not simply eªete connoisseurs, such as the bric-a-brac collector in Lippincott’s, who represented a challenge to the American concept of manhood (although that certainly was an issue), nor the fact that women were beginning to assert themselves as solely responsible for the reconsideration of their cultural role. Other, more complex factors triggered a crisis in male subjectivity. More and more men expressed a desire to escape an increasingly onerous standard of masculinity that combined a relentless work ethic with conflicting moral and social standards. The pressure to succeed at any price caused a number of male collectors, such as John Rockefeller Jr., J. P. Morgan, and Charles Lang Freer, to reject art that mirrored the world and its problems in favor of images that helped them to escape it. This gendering of taste gave rise to a new male arts professional, who recognized that enormous profits could be made from buying and selling art objects, much like the final figure in the Lippincott’s caricature, who cashes in his collectibles on rent day. Artists and dealers jumped into the market created by the Aesthetic and Arts and

16

•

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

Crafts movements’ emphasis on harmoniously decorated interiors and targeted psychologically needy businessmen who were discovering what women had known all along— that finely honed decorative objects could soothe and help them reach that transitional space between dream and reality.63 By peering into the private lives of the elite women in this study, I hope to show that art collecting not only contributed to their self-esteem, but also induced a great many of them to expand their spatial maps by enticing them out of the home, into the thriving American cultural scene—with stunning consequences. Chapter 1, “The Politics of Cultural Space in Antebellum America,” centers on Eliza Bowen Jumel, the first American woman to form a major collection.64 Unlike Abigail Adams, who concentrated on acquiring decorative arts, or Rebecca Gore and Elizabeth Monroe, who participated in the architectural designs of their homes, Jumel dared to combine these interests with more ostentatious symbols of luxury when she branched out into the fine arts. With no female role models to follow at home, she turned to the Duchesse de Berry and Comtesse Tascher de la Pagerie, whom she met during her lengthy stays in France. There, she amassed more than two hundred paintings, in addition to assorted decorative objects. Jumel honed her independence during her rise to respectability and did not hesitate to defy convention by intruding on the male world of commerce to protect her first husband’s fortune. Nor did she have any qualms about quickly divorcing her second husband, Aaron Burr, when he attempted to control her property. Her defiant disregard of social taboos was the subtext of the controversy sparked by the exhibition of her collection at the American Academy of Fine Arts in New York in 1817, at a crucial juncture in American culture. I compare Jumel to two other antebellum collectors who embraced the consumption and display of the arts as a route to self-expression, only to encounter hostile responses. Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt and Mary Telfair upset the guardians of public taste when they took advantage of the cultural space vacated by men during the Civil War. Colt’s aesthetic judgment was challenged when she patriotically bequeathed her collection to a museum, whereas Telfair’s wish to endow her house and collection for the benefit of the public proved so contentious that the U.S. Supreme Court agreed to review the terms of her will. Harbingers of women’s intervention in the cultural sphere, these early collectors were historically constrained and caught in the transition between the dictates of public sacrifice and private satisfaction, culture and comfort, and submissiveness and independence. Chapter 2, “A Conspiracy of Silence,” looks at the obverse side of the debate on public culture by examining postbellum domestic space. The comparative freedom that women briefly enjoyed in post-Revolutionary America was curtailed by the onset of the cult of true womanhood, “which prescribed a female role bounded by kitchen and nursery, overlaid with piety and purity, and crowned with subservience.”65 An understanding of the motivations of homebound Gilded Age women collectors hinges on a psychoanalytical interpretation of their intimate relationship to objects, which I examine through the theoretical model of collecting-as-play. I also explore the injunction against visibility that

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

•

17

plagued women and the conspiracy of silence that enveloped Mary Morgan’s extensive collecting activities. Remarkably, Earl Shinn omitted her from his three-volume survey The Art Treasures of America (1879–82), which was the first complete study of art collecting in the United States. An analysis of the twenty-two women he included in his survey, however, in tandem with those excluded, provides an unparalleled insight into the tensions between male arbiters of culture and female collectors. Central to this issue was whether the decorative arts merited a place in an emerging nation’s conception of taste. In chapter 3, “Art and Activism,” I return to the issue of the politics of cultural space by examining how the increased confidence and self-expression facilitated by collecting in the Gilded Age led the New Women of the Progressive Era to focus their attention outside the home. Clubwomen such as Phoebe Hearst of San Francisco and Bertha Honoré Palmer of Chicago altered their communities when they assumed an instrumental role in bringing to them international expositions. Much more than entertaining events, these ventures placed women’s issues at center stage and proved that lessons learned in the domestic realm were applicable in the wider political arena. Likewise, Alva Vanderbilt and Louisine Havemeyer demonstrated that the organizational skills they had acquired in furnishing and supervising their enormous houses prepared them for promoting women’s suªrage. Harnessing the persuasive powers of art objects and architectural space, they rallied women of all classes to join them in campaigning for electoral equality. Victorious, women next laid claim to a share of America’s cultural property. The title of chapter 4, “The Gendering of the Modern Museum,” refers both to the museums of modern art founded by women in New York in the 1920s and 1930s and a talk given by Eleanor Hewitt in which she redefined modernism from a female standpoint. She and her sister Sarah created the Museum for the Arts of Decoration in 1897 to provide a venue for women to have hands-on access to art objects in a laboratory setting so that they could become self-su‹cient as designers. The Hewitt sisters negotiated between the masculine concept of a museum as a compendium of knowledge and the female view of objects as useful stimulants to individual creativity. Although their pragmatic conception of modernism diªered from the aesthetic visions of Katherine Dreier, Hilla Rebay, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the women who launched the Museum of Modern Art, they were united with these other women in their emphasis on the domestic as a transitional comfort zone and embarkation point for intervention into the public arena. The women patrons of modernism attempted to alter the dominant discourse of possessive individualism by entering into a dialogic exchange with male arbiters of taste. The resulting gendering of cultural space was an unstable proposition, however, and sparked a movement to reclaim modernism as a manly enterprise. The takeover initiated by male arts professionals in the Gilded Age was completed in the modern period by pundits at the Parsons School of Design and the curatorial staª of the Museum of Modern Art, who banished women from their enterprises, declaring war on the cult of the home and celebrating impersonal function over psychological a‹nity.

18

•

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

The sexing of taste is the subject of chapter 5, where I examine Gertrude and Leo Stein’s influence on a group of expatriate American women who were engaged in shaping their own subjectivities and recognized that art collecting oªered them a stage on which they could explore their sexual identities. Wishing to escape the censure of sexologists such as Havelock Ellis who were suspicious of New Women who deviated from conventional gender norms, they looked to Gertrude Stein’s transgressive lifestyle and art collection as models of free expression. Stein’s larger-than-life persona, combined with her assemblage of avant-garde paintings and sculptures, impelled a number of collectors to pay homage to her in Paris, including Etta and Claribel Cone of Baltimore, Emily Crane Chadbourne of Chicago, and Mabel Dodge of Buªalo. The unsung partner in this awakening process was Leo Stein. Whereas Gertrude inspired women to reassess their assigned gender roles, her brother was their eager cicerone, guiding them through galleries and museums and imparting his views on the psychology of aesthetic vision. Sharing the American woman’s a‹nity for decorative objects, Leo Stein endorsed a subjective theory of organicism based on an emotional identification with objects, in opposition to his sister, who intellectually and dispassionately aligned herself with male modernist painters. Empowered by their exposure to both Leo and Gertrude Stein, the women expatriates in their circle returned to America, where they led culturally productive lives. Not all American women viewed modernism as a panacea for their disaªection. In the epilogue to this volume, I reflect on the concept of “modernist nostalgia” to describe the ambivalence many women in the Progressive Era demonstrated toward the corrosive eªects of possessive individualism by turning their backs on modernism’s values and aesthetics. They immersed themselves in the handcrafted art of earlier periods and the artifacts of nonindustrial societies. Encouraged by Carl Jung’s validation of dreaming, Edith Rockefeller McCormick tried to oªset the fragmentation and alienation of the modern metropolis by establishing ideal communities to stimulate the creativity of workers and intellectuals, only to be thwarted by her more powerful brother and father—just as her sister-in-law, Abby Rockefeller, had been rebuked for treading on the toes of male tastemakers. But their dreams were not in vain. Their actions augmented the heft and pitch of women’s voices and turned up the volume of a refrain that had been building since the beginning of the nineteenth century. In concert, women collectors expanded the repertoire of American culture for a larger audience.

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

•

19

5. Alcide Ercole, Eliza Bowen Jumel with Her Grandniece and Grandnephew, Eliza Jumel Chase and William Inglis Chase, 1854, oil on canvas, Morris-Jumel Mansion, New York.

ONE

Y The Politics of Cultural Space in Antebellum America ELIZA BOWEN JUMEL • ELIZABETH HART JARVIS COLT • MARY TELFAIR

E

LIZA BOWEN JUMEL (fig. 5) is representative of the independent antebellum women who transcended social conventions and gender norms but would later be cowed by the Victorian cult of true womanhood. A businesswoman, Francophile, and unabashed lover of fine things, she defied the prevailing standards of femininity and the admonishments against displays of luxury. Jumel was the first American woman to form a substantial collection of paintings, which she used as a means to establish an authentic sense of self. James Cliªord notes that “collecting has long been a strategy for the deployment of a possessive self, culture and authenticity” and is one of the “crucial processes of western identity formation.”1 John Trumbull, the president of the American Academy of Fine Arts in New York, deemed Jumel’s collection of 229 canvases important enough to feature almost half of them in an exhibition at the academy in 1817. Yet Jumel’s contribution to culture has been overshadowed by a steady stream of sensationalist novels that embellish the facts of her biography and treat her life more as a confection than a genuine artifact.2 Her questionable background, assertive personality, and celebrated divorce from her second husband, Aaron Burr, have led her to be caricatured as a prostitute, a madwoman, or, at best, a social climber. Already a magnet for criticism, Jumel attracted further censure when she intrepidly intervened in the cultural space controlled by men. Flaunting convention in both the domestic and the cultural spheres, she dared to cross gender lines and declare herself the curator of her own life. The New York exhibition of Jumel’s art collection in 1817 was a milestone in the history of American culture. Not only was the size of her collection impressive, but in a city

21

lacking an art museum it also oªered the public a rare opportunity to view sixteenth- to eighteenth-century European paintings. It had been fifteen years since the only exhibition of comparable size to be shown in New York had been held at the Columbian Gallery, operated by the artist and showman Edward Savage. As W. G. Constable noted in his pioneering study of American private patronage, there had been little collecting of any importance during the Revolutionary period and the generation following, except by Thomas Jeªerson, James Bowdoin, Robert Gilmor, and a few other individuals who traveled abroad and purchased paintings attributed to the old masters.3 The public, however, was not privy to the contents of these private collections prior to the 1820s, when they were eventually exhibited or sold at auction. Thus the display of Jumel’s paintings was indeed a major event, both in the history of American art and in the international history of exhibitions, considering that it took place seven years before the National Gallery opened its doors in London in 1824.4 Widely reported on in the press, the exhibition exposed tensions within American culture—between elitists and populists, Francophiles and Americanists, artists and patrons, and female and male guardians of taste—all played out against the novelty of a public event directed by a female purveyor of culture. That a woman had assembled such a significant group of paintings awakened a fundamental anxiety over the bold participation of her sex in the emerging male discourse of possessive individualism, which was based on the assumption that an individual freely and self-interestedly enters into market relations, considered to be the bedrock of society.5 Jumel’s presentation of herself as an aggressive and acquisitive individual conveyed her disregard for the fixed notion of passive femininity. Her pursuit of collecting as an avenue to selfhood presents a compelling case study of female agency at the level of lived experience. As extraordinary as Jumel’s collection was for its time and place, it is even more remarkable for what it reveals about gendered patterns of collecting. On why there are so few important women collectors, Elizabeth and Douglas Rigby speculate: “Grand scale collecting almost always calls for aggressive and material ambition to a degree uncharacteristic of women.” These scholars go on to observe that the few females “who came within hailing distance of the collecting giants were women who seemed to exhibit the masculine strain of a highly developed objective competitiveness.”6 Russell Belk also notes that although some women have been famous collectors, “competitive and aggressive characteristics and desire for mastery accord with masculine gendering.”7 Jumel’s success in the art market may be attributed to the “masculine” sense of self-su‹ciency and resourcefulness she practiced in her business aªairs. Her desire to succeed at all costs drove her across the borders of normative femininity, beyond which lay a cultural and social space where she could make her mark as a self-su‹cient, independent woman. Compared to the male collectors of her time, Jumel did not aim for a comprehensive chronological survey of past art, nor did she try to shape the course of American art by patronizing contemporary artists, as did several of her countrymen, notably Robert

22

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

Fulton.8 Nor did she imitate Thomas Jeªerson by mingling her paintings with naturalhistory specimens, maps, and ethnographic artifacts in the tradition of the Kuntskammer.9 As early as the sixteenth century, men used collections to masculinize domestic space; Jumel arranged her works of art to harmonize with one another aesthetically rather than according to scientific or teleological principles.10 Because she did not conform to the trends of her time, Jumel was categorized in a recent survey of early American collectors as a social climber who was a “hardly typical collector,” in contrast to the more progressive and public-minded male collectors of the period.11 Jumel was indeed an atypical collector, but her distinction rests in how she flexed the boundaries of femininity as she entered the male marketplace and blended the discourses of domesticity and possessive individualism. Jumel also diªered from her female peers in several significant ways. The few early American women who collected aesthetic objects integrated the decorative with the fine arts in their homes. In her tracts on furnishing the home, Catharine Beecher advised that the aesthetic element should be subordinated to the overall decorative scheme. More recent research confirms that “most amateur collecting by women served the ends of domestic decoration.”12 Abigail Adams, for instance, revealed an impartial penchant for portraits, nutcrackers, dessert plates, and porcelain figurines in the embellishment of her domestic sphere. Her correspondence with Thomas Jeªerson reveals that although she shared his enthusiasm for acquiring attractive objects, her interest was focused inward on the home and not on impressing visitors with her knowledge of science or the fine arts.13 This home-centered pattern remained the dominant thrust of American women collectors through the antebellum period and Gilded Age, as long as their identity was subsumed by their domestic role. As Linda Kerber astutely observes: “Women had to first name their dependent condition before they could reject it.”14 The few exceptions to this rule were women who loosed the hold of stereotypes and asserted themselves. Although Abigail Adams chafed at the ties that bound her sex, she reluctantly bowed before the social constraints that inhibited her and remained loyal to her domestic calling. Jumel, in contrast, moved beyond the home and exercised more authoritative and commanding “masculine” character traits, which she imprinted on the décor of her mansion. A watercolor of the hall of her home painted in the mid–nineteenth century (plate 2) reveals that Jumel treated this space as a showcase for her old master paintings. The formal, museumlike arrangement resembles the way in which male collectors conveyed pride in their possessions: individual “masterpieces” are highlighted as distinct entities apart from the decorative arts. Although there is no record of how Jumel’s collection was hung at the American Academy of Fine Arts in 1817, the precise arrangement of paintings in her home was consistent with dominant exhibition practices, such as the systematic scheme devised for the exhibition of Robert Fulton’s collection by Charles Willson Peale at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1807.15 Jumel’s pale beige walls and bare floors created a public, almost ceremonial atmosphere, absent of the intimacy evoked by

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

23

6. Anthony Kimbel, “A Parlor View in a New York Dwelling House,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, November 11, 1854, 300.

the decorative details characteristic of the feminine interior, as seen in a contemporary engraving of a New York house (fig. 6). Eschewing the cluttered decor evident in this parlor, Jumel refused to allow objets d’art to distract from her paintings. Ann Parker, who visited Jumel three years before her death in 1862 and recorded her impressions in her diary, observed: “She was very magnificent and amiable in her manners and conversation and called our attention to the superb paintings on the walls, where they were bought, etc.”16 Parker’s comment suggests that unlike the majority of the women of her time, who viewed their paintings as part of their overall decorative scheme, Jumel considered hers as independent entities. There is a further element of Jumel’s interior that separates her from the American women of her time. The gilded wings that surmount both arched doorways, although decorative, create a heraldic rather than a softening eªect. Their Napoleonic design alludes to Jumel’s Francophilia. Viewed in tandem with her old master paintings, they mark this space as more European than American, more masculine than feminine, and more aristocratic than bourgeois.17 Like its owner, this interior strikes a pose and constructs a public image: its resolute ideas are clothed in a wrapping of elegant colors and patterns that announce an elitist agenda.

24

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

Jumel’s gendering of taste, combined with her flaunting of Old World values in a democratic society, contributed to the contentious response to the exhibition of her collection in 1817. Noting John Adams’s admonition about the fine arts, Wayne Craven contends that “the transition to the true patron, collector, and connoisseur as he had existed in Europe for centuries was a slow process in America, perhaps because a certain attitude prevailed which saw art as an unnecessary indulgence and the plaything of an idle aristocracy.”18 Women, as this remark attests, were not considered part of the historical process. Consequently, Jumel’s exhibition of an exceptionally large collection of paintings attributed to famous artists and her convincing portrayal of the patrician patron left her open to criticism, despite her modest social origins. Eliza Jumel’s life was so extraordinary that she might have been imagined by Pierre Mignard or Nicolas de Largillière, or one of the other fanciful portraitists in her collection who specialized in fusing fantasy with reality. Born Betsey Bowen in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1775, she was not, as is frequently claimed, illegitimate. Her parents, John Bowen and Phebe Kelley, were married six years before her birth. Jumel’s childhood was uneventful until her eleventh year, when her father drowned at Newport. The family’s fortunes subsequently spiraled downward, culminating in the expulsion of Phebe and her second husband from Providence for vagrancy in 1791 and their deaths in North Carolina seven years later.19 The next phase of Jumel’s life is riddled with louche details of prostitution and the birth of a child out of wedlock. Alleging to be that child, George Washington Bowen was one of the claimants who initiated proceedings against her estate following her death in 1865. Witnesses who were called to testify as the case wound its way to the Supreme Court indicated that Betsey Bowen had given birth to a son while residing in a house of prostitution in Providence.20 Recent scholars sympathize with the plight of impoverished young women, like Jumel, who sold themselves to earn a living. Barbara Meil Hobson defends “the motivations, moral codes, and survival strategies of poor women” and argues that “prostitution could appear as a viable alternative to low wages and lack of employment options.”21 More surprisingly, Jumel’s legitimate descendants revealed that they were also sympathetic to her plight, when they argued that she should be admired for surmounting the adversity of her background. They contended: It will not be regarded as improbable, that a proud and showy woman like Madame Jumel, lifted by marriage into wealth and splendor, should practice reserve concerning the circumstances of her prior humble condition, especially if they were associated with wretchedness and misery. Such a disposition, surely, is no evidence of guilt. It tends rather to show a praiseworthy determination to rise above former low surroundings.22

Betsey Bowen’s determination to better her lot in life distinguishes her from the typical representation of browbeaten working-class women in early American history. She more closely resembles the astute and inventive laboring women rescued from the plat-

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

25

itudes of history by Christine Stansell in her study of sex and class in New York between the years 1789 and 1860.23 Instead of succumbing to a life of drudgery in Providence, Bowen made her way to the budding metropolis. The sparse documentation that exists concerning her activities between the death of her mother in 1798 and her first marriage, to the merchant Stephen Jumel, in 1804 reveals that she benefited from the more independent role that was temporarily granted to women by the Revolution. Prior to the onset of the reformist cult of true womanhood in the early nineteenth century, American pundits puzzled over the paradox that had occupied Rousseau, Montesquieu, and other Enlightenment philosophers: how to reconcile the concept of liberty with submission to authority.24 How could women be free citizens and subject to their husbands or fathers at the same time? In this more liberal climate, Bowen skillfully carved out a new identity for herself by following the wave of women migrating to New York. An ability to rise above adversity and to refashion her identity would continue to be hallmarks of her long life. Once in New York, Betsey Bowen first supported herself as an actress. William Dunlap, who was the manager of the John Street Theatre (and a founding member of the American Academy of Fine Arts), reported that she was a “supernumerary,” or an extra, in the theater prior to her first marriage.25 It was probably at this point in her life that Betsey changed her name to Eliza. Even though she retired from the stage after her marriage to Jumel, she maintained an interest in the world of theater. Following her husband’s death in 1832, she purchased a theater in Saratoga Springs, where she used a portion of John Vanderlyn’s panorama Versailles as a scenic backdrop.26 These ties to the theater were more than circumstantial: Eliza staged her life as a carefully crafted performance. The parts she played evolved from provincial waif to unwed mother to ingénue to hardheaded businesswoman and, finally, to her starring role as grande dame. As one scholar of the biographical genre notes: “The idea of making oneself over through some combination of education and willful intention would develop, as social and political institutions democratized, into the cultural foundation of a belief in individualism in the West.”27 Moreover, in his recent study of Charles Willson Peale, David Ward comments on the fragility and precariousness of identity as early American society was undergoing rapid modernization: “The maintenance of one’s identity, both inside and out, required constant vigilance.”28 Always a quick study, Eliza Bowen deftly defined and redefined the salient traits of each of her new identities, anticipating the modern individual who is composed of multiple selves. Bowen’s work on the New York stage prepared her for her next role, that of respectable married woman. Stephen Jumel had been forced to flee his native San Domingo (now Haiti) after the slave uprisings of 1791, whereupon he began his career in America as a merchant of foodstuªs. He prospered after he formed a partnership in 1804 with another émigré, Benjamin Desobry: they eventually chartered or owned over a dozen ships, which they used to import and export cognac, wine, oil, china, and dry goods between New Orleans, the Caribbean, and Europe.29 The financial security promised by this partnership impelled Jumel to marry Bowen the same year it was founded.

26

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

7. Morris-Jumel Mansion, 65 Jumel Terrace, New York. Photo: Historic House Trust of New York City/Madeleine Doering.

There is no doubt that Eliza Bowen’s fortunes took a turn for the better when she married Stephen Jumel. Described as a “very handsome . . . man of magnificent proportions,” Stephen must have nonetheless felt somewhat marginalized as a Caribbean Catholic émigré in Protestant New York.30 His marriage to Eliza, then, was more a linking of two outsiders than the misalliance that has been claimed. Stephen’s growing fortune made it possible for them to live comfortably. He first brought Eliza to live in one of the several houses that he had purchased for investment purposes in Manhattan. In 1810 he also acquired a summer retreat, the historic Roger Morris house and accompanying 136 acres of land in Harlem Heights, which had been George Washington’s New York headquarters during the Revolutionary War.31 Today it is the oldest surviving house in Manhattan. Preserved as the Morris-Jumel Mansion (fig. 7), the spacious two-storied residence, with its imposing colonnaded façade, attests to the couple’s a›uence. Eliza Jumel quickly demonstrated a skill for redecorating her home. One of Aaron Burr’s descendants noted: At some point in her life, Madame Jumel had acquired remarkably good taste in the matter of house decorating and furnishing. Her decisions about the work to be done on the Mansion were excellent ones. The wood was scraped bare of its accumulated layers of paint

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

27

and new paint was applied. Walls and floors were reconditioned. Copies of the original wallpapers were secured from France. Fine mahogany and walnut furniture, beautiful French china, the best Irish linens, sparkling glass and crystal, and old English sterling silver were secured and put into the Mansion. Again, it became a show place.32

That Eliza Jumel was recognized for her talents was apparent in 1819, when First Lady Elizabeth Monroe wrote to her, requesting permission for her architect to see the house, explaining that she (Monroe) “has never seen a house she admires so much and wishes when Mr. Monroe builds to have it copied.”33 This friendly letter is not only a testimonial to Jumel’s taste, but it also dispels the persistent characterization of her as a social pariah who tricked her husband into marrying her, a characterization that was promulgated by her first biographer in 1916.34 An earlier chronicler of New York’s expatriate community noted that it was she, rather than her husband, who was socially in demand, explaining that “M. Jumel, although not to the manor born, was well received because of his kindliness and the popularity of his famous wife.”35 Certainly Jumel’s marriage was unconventional: she did not settle into a full-time role as doyenne of a grand house, but actively involved herself in her husband’s business, both in New York and in France, where they traveled for an extended stay in 1815. Whereas Stephen remained abroad until 1828, Eliza returned to New York due to ill health in 1817 and did not rejoin her husband until four years later, in 1821. She then returned to Paris for five more years, sailing back to New York in 1826, two years before Stephen. During her husband’s long absence, she assumed full responsibility for his investments and authoritatively negotiated with the partners in his import-export business. Eliza Jumel’s letters to her husband disclose the mind of an intelligent and incisive businesswoman, one who possessed a modern sense of shared responsibility. She assured Stephen: I don’t fail to go to New York every day to watch over our aªairs. I am most the active and best agent you’ve ever had because I am guided by your interests and mine which are identical, and I promise you, I neglect nothing. If you have orders to give me, I will execute them faithfully.36

Eliza was uninhibited by the constraints of coverture, which prohibited married women from owning an interest in their husbands’ assets. Stephen demonstrated that he shared his wife’s confidence in her abilities when he granted her his power of attorney in 1826. This act has induced her critics to insist that Eliza was intent on “robbing Stephen Jumel of his fortune.”37 Yet, their correspondence suggests that his intention was to shelter his assets from a possible legal action.38 Taking her responsibility to heart, Eliza sidestepped the rules of coverture and turned to the law of equity instead, formulating a trust in favor of her niece Mary, whom the Jumels had invited to live with them as their daughter.39 This strategy not only protected the Jumels’ property from their creditors, but it would also prove to be a source of frustration to Aaron Burr when he attempted to lay his hands

28

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

on it during his brief marriage with Eliza. A mutual love of French culture and material comfort was not enough to sustain the union between Eliza and Burr: alarmed at his rapacity and suspecting him of adultery, Eliza filed for divorce in 1834 after only one year of marriage—an action that prompted one historian to marvel that nothing more vividly revealed “her business ability” than the e‹ciency with which she got rid of Burr.40 Such financial acumen on the part of an early-nineteenth-century female was not as anomalous as it appears. Scholars have discovered more than a few women who took advantage of legal devices that averted coverture to acquire separate estates as a hedge against family bankruptcy or to improve their social status.41 Furthermore, additional research points to the close relationship between domestic ideology and the growth of capitalism: women like Jumel, who operated from within the private female sphere, nonetheless aªected the development of nineteenth-century American market society through the eªorts they made on behalf of their families.42 Even so, if the notion of possessive individualism hinges on ownership of the self, the vast majority of nineteenth-century women were excluded. But not Eliza Jumel: armed with her husband’s power of attorney, she became a true citizen of the republic, in the sense that she represented her own interests, personally and materially. Jumel is noteworthy in this context because she managed to forge a complex identity for herself by functioning on so many fronts simultaneously: the domestic, the commercial, and the aesthetic. During her first sojourn in Paris, between 1815 and 1817, Eliza Jumel perfected her knowledge of the fine arts and acquired the 229 paintings that would earn her a place in the annals of American collecting. Her term of ownership was relatively short-lived: she sold most of the collection when she rejoined her husband in Paris in 1821, but not before the New York public had been given the opportunity to view her purchases.43 When Eliza Jumel arrived back in New York in 1817, John Trumbull immediately borrowed almost one hundred paintings from her collection to exhibit at the American Academy of Fine Arts.44 Having spent seven years in Europe studying art and copying old master paintings, Trumbull would have immediately recognized the importance of Jumel’s artworks.45 Where did Eliza Jumel manage to acquire such a collection? A clue to the provenance of her paintings appears in the letters of John Pintard, another member of the American Academy of Fine Arts, who confided to his daughter that “Madame Jumel,” on her return from France, brought “with her a collection of Paintings, [said] to have belonged to Cardinal Flesche [sic].”46 This chain of ownership is plausible in terms of time, place, and taste. Joseph, Cardinal Fesch, was Napoleon Bonaparte’s uncle. He temporarily left the priesthood in 1793 to aid Napoleon as supplier to the French army. Taking advantage of the opportunity to acquire plundered works of art, Fesch continued to augment his collection after he returned to religious life, eventually owning an astounding thirty thousand works of art.47 After quarreling with Napoleon over his loyalty to Pope Pius VII, Fesch retired to his diocese in Lyon in 1812, where he remained until he finally settled in Rome after his nephew’s downfall. From Rome, Fesch orchestrated a series of sales from

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

29

his vast collection in Paris and London. Eliza Jumel was in Paris at the time of his sale of 213 paintings on June 17, 1816. Jumel may have learned of Fesch’s collection through her American acquaintances. John Trumbull was still in Paris when she arrived in the summer of 1815, and it is possible that he arranged for Jumel to see Fesch’s collection through his friend, the artist Maria Cosway.48 Cosway knew Fesch well during the years she spent in Paris, painting views of the interior of the Louvre, and she apparently helped him to acquire and restore some of his paintings. Like many artists during this period, including Trumbull, Cosway supplemented her income by dealing in pictures. An even more controversial figure than Jumel due to her intimate relationship with Thomas Jeªerson, Cosway was also rumored to have been romantically involved with Cardinal Fesch.49 Although she had moved to Italy to open a school for girls by the time Eliza Jumel arrived in Paris, Cosway passed through the city on two occasions in 1815, on her way to and from London, and could have eªected Jumel’s introduction to Fesch.50 The catalogue of the June 1816 sale of works from Fesch’s collection reveals a concentration of artists and subjects remarkably similar to that of Jumel’s collection.51 Both collections featured sixteenth- and seventeenth-century French, Italian, Flemish, and Dutch artists. This distribution distinguishes Jumel’s taste from that of other early American collectors, who tended to be uninterested in Flemish and Dutch artists.52 While the absence of illustrations in either the 1816 catalogue of the Fesch sale or the 1817 catalogue of the American Academy of Fine Arts exhibition of Jumel’s works makes it di‹cult to draw any irrefutable connection between the collections, there are several possible matches. The most striking point of contact between the collections is the presence of relatively obscure painters of the seventeenth-century Lyonnais school, such as Jean Chavanne and Antoine Bouzonnet Stella, whom Fesch discovered in his capacity as Archbishop of Lyon.53 In addition, both collections featured portraits of Madame de Montespan attributed to Pierre Mignard.54 Also, a work in Fesch’s sale by the seventeenth-century Flemish painter Abshoven, representing “several peasants around a small table in front of the door of a tavern,” corresponds to the “Absoven” [sic] listed in Jumel’s 1821 sale, Tap Room or Tabagia (1600).55 Many more artists were in both collections, such as Salvator Rosa, Isack van Ostade, Guido Reni, Jean Raoux, and Gaspard Dughet, although the titles assigned to their paintings in the catalogues are too vague to provide a conclusive pairing. At the same time, there are enough diªerences between the two collections to indicate that Jumel did not acquire her paintings en masse from the Fesch sale in 1816. There are two other likely sources for works in Jumel’s collection: dealers and impoverished private collectors.56 The primary Parisian dealer of the Napoleonic period was Jean Baptiste Pierre Le Brun, who is said to have worked for Cardinal Fesch and is known to have collaborated with Trumbull when the artist tried his hand at picture dealing during the winter of 1794–95.57 Although Le Brun died in 1813, his collection was sold the following year, and his stock still would have been in circulation in the shops of other Parisian dealers

30

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

when Jumel arrived. If any of her paintings originated with Le Brun, it would perhaps explain Trumbull’s willingness to exhibit her collection, given his familiarity with the dealer’s holdings. Jumel did not have to rely entirely on dealers to amass artworks, however. Like many subsequent nineteenth-century American travelers, she sought acceptance in a grander social sphere in Europe than she enjoyed at home. William C. Preston, in 1817, commented on his fellow Americans’ “preeminent and indecent propensity to thrust themselves upon exclusive circles.”58 Unlike most of these travelers, however, Jumel had the benefit of a French-speaking husband who had encouraged her to become fluent in his native language by paying for her French lessons, even before their marriage.59 As her correspondence reveals, Eliza communicated in their native language with a wide circle of titled monarchists and Bonapartists in Paris. This coup gave her access to collectors whose incomes had suddenly vanished due to the post-Revolutionary turmoil in France. Among the monarchists with whom Jumel associated during her two stays abroad, the highest ranking was a member of the Bourbon royal family, the Duchesse de Berry. A noted art collector, the duchess would have provided Jumel with a female role model that was lacking in America. It is likely that they met in Paris through the Marquise de Cubières and his family, well-known members of the New York community of titled French émigrés with whom the Jumels were known to have socialized prior to their departure for Europe.60 Eliza Jumel also socialized with the Duchesse de Berry in the port city of Dieppe, where Stephen Jumel bought a summer house in 1816 on the place des Bains.61 It was in Dieppe that the duchess shocked her aristocratic peers by swimming in public and dancing with bourgeois o‹cials at municipal balls. Her circle of friends was noted for its mixture of women drawn from “all classes, all periods, all courts from the Directory to that of Charles X.”62 Thus the Duchesse de Berry’s friendship with an American woman of dubious background is not as unexpected as it might appear. One can imagine the interests that drew these two women together: a love of art and the theater, and a disregard for convention. The duchess’s social transgressions paled beside her political actions, however: following the Revolution of 1830, she would muster a rebellion to secure the succession of her son Henri to the Bourbon throne, for which she would be imprisoned.63 This formidable friend presented Eliza Jumel with the opportunity to reshape her personal identity once again by imitating the duchess’s unceremonious behavior and blending it with a sophisticated veneer of culture. Eliza Jumel’s social coup among the royalist faction, though, did not prevent her from winning acceptance among the Bonapartists as well. Her most illustrious Bonapartist acquaintance was the Comtesse Henri Tascher de la Pagerie, who was married to a cousin of Josephine de Beauharnais, Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife. When the Frenchwoman’s young husband died in 1816, Eliza invited the countess to live with her and Stephen in Paris.64 Again, Jumel’s American contacts may have forged the introduction: the daughter of her Francophile friend Elizabeth Monroe had become a close friend of Josephine’s daughter, Hortense, after they attended school together in Paris while James Monroe rep-

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

31

resented the fledgling U.S. government there.65 It could also have been Stephen Jumel’s position as a ship owner that brought him to the attention of the Bonapartes: Eliza later complained in a letter to Louis XVIII that Napoleon had seized two of her husband’s ships and had not compensated him.66 Whether it was the Monroes or Stephen’s fruitless search for remuneration that brought the Jumels into the Bonapartist circle, they took advantage of the opportunity to acquire the possessions of the Comtesse Tascher de la Pagerie. Born Marcelle Clary, the daughter of a wealthy soap manufacturer in Marseilles, the countess was also connected to the Bonapartes through her aunts, Julie Clary, who was married to Joseph Bonaparte and reigned as Queen of Spain, and Desirée, Napoleon’s former fiancée, who married Jean-Baptiste Bernadotte and reigned as Queen of Sweden.67 Despite these illustrious connections, the countess and her husband seem to have been chronically short of funds: Josephine complained, the year after their marriage, “As far as Henri Tascher is concerned, I was unaware that he needed money; the king of Spain gave him one million at the time of his marriage. I paid 30,000 francs for a diamond parure for his wife.”68 One explanation for their lack of money is that Napoleon became disillusioned with Henri shortly after he rapidly promoted him from colonel to maréchal de camp and finally to comte de l’ Empire in 1810, the year before his marriage to Marcelle Clary.69 The emperor tartly commented: He has failed too completely in his duty to me to take any trouble about him. The little blackguard took oª the French cockade at Madrid without giving me notice simply because he fell in love and completely forgot all the duty he owed me, especially before that occasion. Let him do what he likes and marry whom he chooses. I do not care a jot.70

Having sacrificed his career to follow his heart, Henri had little time to recoup his losses before his premature death in 1816. When the widowed countess was forced to sell her most prized possessions, she apparently found a ready buyer in Eliza Jumel for her famed set of diamonds and Napoleonic relics. Eliza Jumel’s grandniece, who lent the historic assortment of furniture, objets d’art, jewels, and memorabilia that she had inherited to an exhibition in 1895, spelled out their reputed provenance in the accompanying catalogue: At the death of Count Henri Tascher de la Pagerie in 1816, his widow, who . . . lived in the same house in Paris with the Jumels, being in straitened circumstances, sold the furniture and jewels of Napoleon and Josephine to Monsieur and Madame Jumel for the sum of twenty-five thousand dollars. The authenticity therefore of all these relics is assured; . . . Madame la Comtesse de la Pagerie, on repeated occasions talked about them to Madame Jumel, with whom she was on terms of greatest intimacy.71

It is unlikely that all of these items were actually from the estates of Napoleon and Josephine. One must take into account Eliza Jumel’s tendency in later life to aggrandize her illustrious acquaintances; nonetheless, her association with the countess has not been

32

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

called into question. Some of the items, however, were presumably gifts from the celebrated couple to the Comte and Comtesse Tascher de la Pagerie. Jumel’s elaborate set of diamond jewelry seems to have come from this source: it consisted of a pair of diamond solitaire earrings with drops containing twenty-six diamonds, a gold-backed comb mounted with 106 diamonds, and a necklace of forty-eight diamonds set in gold.72 Considering the Frenchwoman’s financial constraints, she would have been understandably willing to part with even her most treasured possessions. By the same token, the countess may have agreed to broker the sale of paintings between Jumel and other disenfranchised Bonapartists. While the provenance of Jumel’s art collection remains tantalizingly vague, her timely arrival in Paris in 1815 presented her with a wealth of options, ranging from the picture stock of the recently deceased dealer Le Brun, to Cardinal Fesch’s sale of paintings, to the personal possessions of the Comtesse Tascher de la Pagerie and other insolvent Bonapartists. The distinguished origins of Jumel’s art collection undoubtedly played a part in its welcome by Trumbull and his fellow Francophiles at the American Academy of Fine Arts in 1817. From its inception, the academy looked to France as a cultural model. It was even conceived on French soil, when Chancellor Robert Livingston, who was appointed American Minister to France by President Jeªerson, came up with the idea of acquiring plaster casts of antique sculpture to start a school to train American artists. In 1801 he wrote to his brother Edward, then mayor of New York, asking him to start a subscription among admirers of the fine arts.73 Launched the following year, the academy boasted seventynine subscribers enlisted by Edward Livingston, while his brother Robert awarded a series of honorary memberships to Frenchmen, including Napoleon and Dominique Vivant Denon, the director of the Louvre.74 Like many Americans at this time, the Livingstons considered France a sister republic and questioned the appropriateness of continuing British traditions in a democracy. They rejected the paradigm of the artist-operated English Royal Academy and turned instead to the older European system of enlightened private patronage. The pro-French stance that characterized the original subscribers to the academy was typified by Aaron Burr, who had financed the artist John Vanderlyn’s five-year stay in Paris.75 Burr’s participation in the cultural agenda of New York’s first art academy lent it a national imprimatur: at this moment of optimism preceding his fateful 1804 duel with Alexander Hamilton, he was serving as vice president of the United States. Burr recognized among his colleagues at the academy a group of like-minded men of wealth and position who shared his antipathy to Great Britain and believed that the classical tradition, as codified in French aesthetics, oªered a more suitable moral model for a new country. His fellow Jeªersonian Republicans, including the Livingstons and DeWitt Clinton, who dominated the academy’s membership, were undeterred by the elitist association of the fine arts due to their belief that culture would civilize the masses. When Trumbull assumed the presidency of the academy in 1816, he endorsed the elit-

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

33

ist goals of the institution—one of his first acts was to change its name from the American Academy of Arts to the American Academy of Fine Arts. This allegiance to the autocratic Old World order proved too rigid for the increasingly democratic values of the American art world and would provide the subtext for generations of struggle. More immediately, the exhibition of the Jumel collection of European paintings in 1817 exacerbated existing doubts about the appropriateness of a Continental model for an American academy. First, however, the one player missing from this scenario had to return to the stage: Eliza Jumel sailed back to New York without her husband, bringing her collection with her, in the spring of 1817. Over the course of the summer, arrangements were made between her representative and the academy for the loan of ninety-nine paintings for an exhibition in September. Her instructions regarding insurance, method of delivery, and the length of the loan were characteristically precise and demonstrated her flair for business matters.76 Her generosity notwithstanding, Jumel was accepted as a patron in name only: her gender excluded her from membership in the academy. Although the concept of possessive individualism had become more pronounced in the years since the academy’s founding due to the pro-market policies of presidents Madison and Monroe, it nevertheless reflected a masculine selfhood that excluded women by virtue of their restricted access to property.77 Still, Jumel’s proprietorship of an impressive art collection, combined with her involvement in commercial activities that had previously been the exclusive preserve of male domains, put those tenets to the test. As soon as the exhibition opened, it was the subject of acrimonious debate. Although Jumel’s collection was supplemented by loans from other collectors and approximately fifty pictures by living artists, bringing the number of works on view to almost three hundred, it was Jumel’s paintings that were attacked by reviewers. The American Monthly Magazine observed: “The Managers of this exhibition had erroneously conceived themselves bound to hang up all the pictures belonging to a certain large collection . . . and unfortunately the largest of these pictures are generally the worst.”78 This assessment was mild compared to the caustic review serialized in twenty installments in the daily newspaper The National Advocate between September 12 and November 8, 1817, and reprinted, in part, in the New York Evening Post. Writing under the pseudonym “Neutral Tint,” the critic was one of the academy’s own members, the British-born painter and engraver John Rubens Smith, who had arrived in New York the previous year.79 Smith was more closely associated with the academy than most of its members, due to the fact that he served as superintendent of its premises and also conducted drawing classes there for his private pupils. He had been expelled from the academy the previous year due to his rancorous response to the directors’ failure to act on his objection to nudity in paintings by Vanderlyn exhibited there, but he had been reinstated as an honorary member after he reconsidered his hastiness and apologized.80 Still, the acerbic tone of his lengthy critique of the Jumel exhibition discloses that he harbored resentment against its members in general, and its o‹cers in particular. By targeting the academy’s elitist orientation, Fran-

34

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

cophilia, and neglect of living artists, Smith placed its conservative concept of culture on trial. His progressive stance, however, did not embrace the issue of female ownership of cultural property. In Smith’s oblique references to Jumel, he indicted her along with male members of the collecting elite. Commenting on the painting St. Peter Delivered from Prison by an Angel, attributed to Jusepe de Ribera, Smith pronounced: “This must have been a peculiar angel, for if any gentleman, after this, should address his favorite by the title of angelic, he would certainly be paying her a very DIRTY compliment” (September 27). His venom rose when he reached Le Noir’s Massacre of Innocents, which he dismissed for its “pipeclay children and raw beef females, surrounded with scarlet robed murderers in a mud temple!! Pshaw!” For the most part, he judged the Gallic artists in Jumel’s collection guilty of “frippery” (September 18 and 23). This charge may have been a covert reference to Jumel’s gender, but Smith seems also to have been party to the early American perception of the French as a predominantly fickle people.81 Beyond his apparent Francophobia, however, he clearly believed that the academy should redirect its energies to promoting living American artists (October 4 and 7). His critique unleashed a storm of criticism that would not abate for some time to come. Yielding to the Americanist faction, the academy removed several of Jumel’s paintings from display in December 1817 and replaced them with works by Benjamin West.82 Nonetheless, articles critical of the institution continued to appear in the press over the next several years, creating a climate of discontent that ultimately resulted in artists forming the rival National Academy of Design.83 While Jumel’s collection was unwittingly caught in the crossfire of a contentious art world—between artists and patrons competing for control of that world, and between those favoring an American homegrown art and those in support of one influenced by the Franco-European tradition—just one year earlier, in 1816, another woman had managed to escape censure when she exhibited a major collection of old master paintings because she chose a domestic rather than a public venue. Rosalie Stier Calvert reluctantly invited the public to view her family’s collection of sixty-three paintings by Peter Paul Rubens, Anthony van Dyck, Jan Brueghel, and other old masters at Riversdale, the home she shared with her husband in Maryland. Descended from Rubens, Calvert held the collection in trust for her family, who had fled to Philadelphia from Antwerp in 1794 to avoid the Napoleonic invasion. She gave in to requests to display the collection shortly before it was to be reunited with her parents, who had returned to Antwerp. Jacqueline Letzer theorizes that Calvert evaded the criticism leveled at Jumel “because her collection was seen as organically linked to her and her family, and not the result of a flamboyant act of consumerism.”84In other words, Calvert managed to avoid the contentious politics of cultural space due to the domestic setting of her exhibition and the fact that she was a custodian rather than a collector. Even if Jumel’s gender was a subtext of the criticisms of 1817, her elitist aesthetic was not. In addition to her preference for European old masters, Jumel’s taste resembled that

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

35

of established connoisseurs in her propensity for copies and replicas. The making of copies was an academically sanctioned practice; in fact, it was considered an important ingredient in an artist’s training, including at the American Academy of Fine Arts. Furthermore, collectors did not shy away from buying them: half of Jeªerson’s collection consisted of copies of well-known works of art. The Port Folio, for instance, in 1811, advised wealthy collectors to buy copies of European masterpieces.85 “Neutral Tint,” however, clearly despised a practice that looked backward to the European past rather than forward to the American future. He was quick to point out the presence of several “very, very bad copies” among Jumel’s paintings (September 23). His verdict challenged the aesthetic sensibilities of European collectors, who, by implication, were leading their American imitators astray. “Neutral Tint” leveled a more serious allegation against Jumel when he impugned the authenticity of her paintings by Mignard, van Dyck, and Brueghel, among others (September 12 and 23). While Smith should not be considered the final arbiter in the matter of authenticity, inflated attributions were not unusual at a time when the science of connoisseurship and the discipline of art history were still in their infancy. Even so, Jumel’s collection appears to have had a more distinguished provenance than works purchased from traveling auctioneers or from the dealer Michael Paª, who opened a gallery in New York in 1812 and was said to have had “more genuine Raphaels, Correggios, and Da Vincis, than can now be found in all the churches and palaces of Europe!”86 That not everyone agreed with Smith’s assessment of the quality of Jumel’s paintings is apparent in Martha Lamb’s assertion, in The Homes of America (1879), that “Madame Jumel . . . being quite a connoisseur in art, selected two or three hundred fine paintings in Europe about 1816, making her home one of the rarest picture-galleries in the America of that period.”87 Yet lack of documentation impedes any attempt to validate the provenance of Jumel’s paintings. For the same reason, it is di‹cult to identify her paintings with any certainty, or to trace their whereabouts today. American museum records are sketchy prior to the late nineteenth century, and many curators have made wholesale reattributions of the paintings under their supervision as more and more catalogues raisonnés of artists’ works are published.88 And while the electronic resources recently made available by the Getty Provenance Index are a great asset in locating works of art, its database is drawn from existing museum and auction records and therefore contains the same lacuna. Despite this caveat, the Getty’s online archive points to several conceivable correlations between paintings in American museums and Jumel’s collection.89 A pair of pictures credited to Sébastien Le Clerc at the academy’s exhibition (nos. 6 and 7), for instance, appear to correspond with two paintings in the collection of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts that are ascribed to his younger contemporary Sébastien Bourdon. Rebecca and Eleazer (fig. 8) fits a description given to a Le Clerc painting in 1817: “A Company of Gentlemen, Ladies, and Children, in the dresses of the last Century, amusing themselves in groups. The scenery is beautiful, rich, and picturesque.” Its mate was more

36

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

8. Sébastien Bourdon, Rebecca and Eleazar, c. 1664, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection. Photograph © 2008 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

generally described in 1817 as “a similar composition with the last, with a Fountain and Landscape, exquisitely finished”; although somewhat terse, this description could apply to Bourdon’s Christ and the Woman of Samaria.90 Because there is a gap in the provenance of the Boston paintings between the time they were sold in Paris in 1777 and when Wildenstein Galleries acquired them in 1962, prior to the Museum of Fine Arts’ purchase of them in 1968 with funds provided by the Juliana Cheney Edwards bequest, it is possible that Jumel’s paintings may have found their way to Boston. The resources of the Getty Provenance Index make it easier to track artists whose works were less likely to have been forged in Jumel’s day, such as the Dutch seventeenth-century painter Frans Post, who produced a fascinating body of work documenting his travels to Brazil. Only three of his paintings are in the United States, in museums in Detroit, Hartford, and Sarasota (fig. 9). This suggests that Post may have made his American debut in 1821, when his Africans Rejoicing appeared in Jumel’s sale (no. 189).91 Admittedly, this process of locating the adoptive homes of Jumel’s family of paintings is fraught with uncertainty. Who would venture to guess, for instance, how many copies were made of Guercino’s Incredulity of St. Thomas (no. 107 in the 1817 catalogue)? How likely is it that the copy at the Peabody-Essex Museum in Salem, Massachusetts, originally belonged to Jumel? By the same token, the titles assigned in 1817 and 1821 to Jumel’s paintings by

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

37

9. Frans Post, Rural Landscape in Brazil, 1664, oil on wood panel, Bequest of John Ringling, Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, Sarasota.

other well-known masters were too generic to aid in their recovery today. These vagaries, which are endemic to provenances of early American art collections, have clouded Jumel’s contribution to culture. Although she has received little recognition for her place in the history of American collecting, Eliza Jumel altered the face of early-nineteenth-century culture. She presented New Yorkers with a rare opportunity to study European art in the era before the city’s museums were founded. Jumel also realized that collecting could be a vehicle for expanding fixed notions of female identity and introduced the novel trope of the woman collector at a crucial juncture in the history of American cultural development. Jumel’s bold intervention into cultural space would not be reenacted by women collectors until the modern period. Cowed by the submissive values promulgated by the cult of true womanhood that rapidly gained ascendancy after the Civil War, postbellum art aficionados focused their attention on the home. Some designated in their wills that their collections be given to museums, but their art was rarely displayed outside their homes during their lifetimes. Aside from the more reclusive role of women collectors, another reason for their lack of access to cultural space was the homebound nature of their col-

38

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

lections, which became increasingly weighted in favor of the decorative arts, making them less acceptable to male curators and board members who had little regard for “minor” art forms. Before that would occur, however, two notable antebellum women made significant contributions to culture in the years bracketing the Civil War. The disruption caused by the war opened a space for Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt and Mary Telfair to lay plans for the display and cultural consumption of their collections. Despite the fact that Colt was a Yankee widow and Telfair a Confederate spinster, they shared a desire to raise the level of taste in their communities. Telfair added a codicil to her will a year after the Civil War ended, explaining that she was bequeathing her home and collection to the Georgia Historical Society because “America is only behind Europe in the fine arts.”92 Colt also reflected on the role of art in society during the war years and began to form the major collection that she would eventually bequeath to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut. Aside from their political diªerences, both women were actively involved in female philanthropies concerned with social welfare and health, which in turn anticipated the reforms of the Progressive Era.93 In these transitional years before the onset of the rigorous Victorian behavioral code, Colt and Telfair took full advantage of the unsupervised access to money that their unmarried status allowed them and used their art collections to signal their independence. Although neither attracted the censure that Jumel invited when she displayed her collection, both became the subject of intense posthumous controversy. Elizabeth Colt’s fortune was based on her husband Samuel Colt’s invention of the revolver and other repeating-action firearms. The profits of the Colt Armory soared during the Civil War, despite Samuel’s unexpected death in 1862 at the age of forty-seven. Inheriting the equivalent of $200 million in today’s dollars, Elizabeth did not attempt to disguise the origin of her fortune, going so far as to incorporate a gun motif into the sculptural program of the church she commissioned in memory of her husband in 1867.94 In the tradition of Renaissance patrons who insisted on including their portraits in religious compositions, she viewed the art that she commissioned, as well as the objects she collected, as expressions of personal identity. Though she has been identified, in recent literature, as America’s first woman collector, Elizabeth Colt in fact followed in the wake of Eliza Jumel when she set out to amass an extensive collection of fine and decorative art.95 Less than three years after the death of her husband, who had been uninterested in collecting, she added an art gallery to her home and remodeled the library to showcase her holdings, which over time would grow to more than one thousand examples of European and American painting, ceramics, glass, and cloisonné, coins, icons, and other objets d’art.96 Colt’s preliminary pattern of collecting resembled Jumel’s in that she focused on paintings, but she diªered from Jumel in initially giving priority to American artists. A defining moment in Colt’s aesthetic education took place in 1864 at the Metropolitan Fair in New York, sponsored by the U.S. Sanitary Commission to raise funds for Civil War military camps. President of the Hartford Soldier’s Aid Society, Colt represented her organization at the fair, which included

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

39

an art gallery featuring paintings by Frederic Church and Albert Bierstadt, both of whom would soon be represented in her collection. Although Church has been credited with advising Colt on her selection of Hudson River School artists, documents reveal that she “immersed herself ” in studying art books and made the rounds of New York artists’ studios, dealers’ showrooms, and exhibitions.97 She may also have toured the private collections of August Belmont and John Taylor Johnston, which were open to the public to coincide with the fair.98 Belmont specialized in works by contemporary Continental artists, several of whom Colt would add to her collection; however, her taste more closely resembled Johnston’s mix of paintings by American and European artists. A photograph of her gallery as it appeared circa 1880 (fig. 10) reveals that Colt’s painting collection blended portraits of herself and her husband with American landscapes celebrating the mystical claims of Manifest Destiny (achieved with the aid of weapons produced by the Colt Armory); also partially visible at the far left is a reflection on the sanctity of motherhood, The Angel’s Oªering (c. 1850–80) by the French academic painter Hughes Merle. The patriotic and religious themes of these paintings are consistent with two of Colt’s major preoccupations in life.99 The painting portion of Colt’s collection met with no objection from the beneficiaries of her bequest to the Wadsworth Atheneum when her will was read in 1905; however, the decorative arts that she assiduously accumulated after visiting the Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition in 1876 caused a stir. Like many Gilded Age women collectors, Colt preferred tactile objets d’art to paintings. She had been a driving force behind the Hartford Decorative Arts Society, but instead of attempting to infiltrate the public spaces of the Atheneum she had staged oriental teas and tableaux-vivants in her home to raise funds for the society and the women’s charities she supported. Although Colt, in 1886, endorsed the merger of the Decorative Arts Society with three other arts factions operated by men to form the Art Society of Hartford (which managed the Atheneum’s art gallery), she lost control when J. P. Morgan and his allies staged a leadership coup in 1891.100 Alan Wallach speculates that Morgan and the Atheneum’s other trustees hesitated to accept Colt’s collection, along with the $50,000 she had designated for an addition bearing her name, because her level of taste did not meet their aesthetic standards.101 No doubt the accompanying monetary gift persuaded them to acquiesce to the terms of her bequest and construct the Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt galleries. It did not prevent museum o‹cials from consigning her decorative arts to the basement, however, where they remained until curators William Hosley and Karen Blanchfield rescued them in 1996 when they staged the exhibition Colt: The Making of an American Legend.102 Hosley astutely defended Colt by relating her motives to the broader “quest by American women to define the meaning of personal sovereignty and to play an important role in public aªairs.”103 Like Jumel, Colt traversed the domestic frontier, perceived art as a means to declare her self-identity, and upset the wardens of public taste, but she missed the satisfaction of seeing the first municipal museum wing in this country to be named after a female collector.

40

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

10. Picture gallery, Armsmear, Elizabeth Colt residence, Hartford, Connecticut, c. 1880. Photo: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.

Although there were too few antebellum women collectors to draw sweeping conclusions about their patterns of taste, it is possible to identify certain trends. Jumel, Colt, and Telfair stand out for their palpable use of art to further their personal agendas and attain recognition in the male-dominated realm of cultural aªairs at a time of gender and political instability. Their propensity for collecting expensive paintings aligns them with masculine taste and distinguishes them from the majority of wealthy women in this period who deferred to their husbands on matters of the fine arts. This appraisal does not imply that a “feminine” private pattern of collecting existed in complete opposition to a “masculine” public mode. Even though Colt transferred her enthusiasm to the womanly territory of the decorative arts, she nevertheless followed gendered protocol in displaying her paintings separately and in a symmetrical arrangement, as the photograph of her picture gallery attests. This bifurcated presentation speaks to the split subjectivity of antebellum women who negotiated between the republican ideal of liberty and the de facto standard of womanly submissiveness. By stretching the bonds of womanhood, they demonstrated that female subjectivity was far from static; rather, it “connotes a self always in process, always becoming.”104 Postbellum women collectors would continue to explore aspects of their psyches through art and the entrée it gave them to the wider world of experience. Mary Telfair’s subjectivity was multiply fragmented due to her intellectual aspirations,

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

41

sexual ambiguity, and social status as a spinster. Enrichetta Narducci caught some of these traits in the miniature portrait she painted of Telfair in 1842 (plate 3). Her heavy-lidded eyes target the spectator with an appraising and inquiring gaze that counters the modesty of her lace cap and collar. Born in the South but educated in the North, Telfair relished the unstructured stimulation of the metropolis as well as the predictable routines of Savannah society. She declared: “I am fascinated with the Yankees—they are the best educated, most hospitable, and agreeable people in the United States.” Yet in another, more measured disclosure, to her New York friend Mary Few, Telfair divulged her divided loyalties: I fear I have two characters—a northern and a southern one—You see me only as a dissipated creature, luxuriating on fine scenery and talk—apparently without habits—You ought to come to Georgia to see this picture reversed. Here I am cheerful and domestic surrounded by my books and work—drawing as much society as I can to my own home, and seldom straying from it.105

Despite the genteel image she sketched of her daily life in Savannah, Telfair was far from the stereotypical Southern lady, who, according to Ann Firor Scott’s authoritative study, was trained by parents, churches, and magazines to practice an ideal of submissiveness and to depend on male protection.106 She was fortunate that her father, a merchant-planter and three-term governor of Georgia, believed in female education and allowed her to leave home at the age of ten to study at Miss Dow’s academy in New York, where she lived with the family of Colonel Few, a former U.S. senator from Georgia. This early experience shaped Telfair’s lifelong interest in politics, education, and, more importantly, self-su‹ciency, leading her to proudly declare: “I am an independent Lady.”107 One of the first women in this country to establish an art museum, Telfair defied the male relatives who expected to inherit her fortune. Like Colt, Telfair responded to the threat of the Civil War by reflecting on what she most valued in life and laying strategic plans for the future preservation of her collection. Her interest in art was sparked by a bequest of six prints representing the Muses that she received in 1814 at the age of twenty-two. She added to her holdings over the years by making purchases locally, in New York, and on her travels in Europe, eventually owning more than 150 old master paintings, as well as an assortment of prints, sculptures, and objets d’art.108 Telfair’s painting collection resembled Jumel’s in its mixture of original works and copies. Some of the attributions have been questioned over the years, and many of the canvases were scattered prior to the appointment of a professional staª at the Telfair Museum of Art in the 1970s. Those paintings that remain in the museum today predominantly feature historical and poetic female subjects, suggesting that their owner was partial to representations of her own sex.109 Telfair diªered from Jumel and Colt in her intensely personal response to art. She never displayed her collection to the public prior to her bequest, perhaps because she looked to

42

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

11. Horatio Greenough, Medora, 1832, marble, Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, on extended loan to The Baltimore Museum of Art, R.11168.

art as a source of private gratification. In analyzing her attraction to the visual arts, Telfair concluded: “Taste may be defined [as] the power of receiving pleasure from the beauties of nature and of art.”110 While this attitude was a standard aspect of aesthetic philosophy, stemming from the theories of Immanuel Kant, the kind of pleasure that Telfair enjoyed when viewing certain works of art was a far cry from the rationality and morality Kant advocated as the ultimate goal of artistic contemplation when he declared that pleasure “represents the object simply in relation to sense, [and] must first be brought by the concept of a purpose under principles of reason.”111 Her rapturous response to Horatio Greenough’s 1832 marble sculpture Medora (fig. 11), which she saw in Robert Gilmor’s collection in Baltimore, was more sensuous than intellectual. Telfair wrote: “Nothing that I have ever seen from the pencil or the chisel can compare with it. The shroud is perfect— so transparent that the knees were seen through it. . . . the dimpled hand and arm so beautiful and so natural.”112 Infusing Greenough’s marmoreal corpse with a lifelike presence, Telfair transformed Medora into a sensuous object of desire.113 Her form of pleasure resembles the jouissance that Michael Camille argues is “at the foundations of the act of collecting.” He defines it “not as a passive and merely optical response but as an active, productive and shaping stimulation of all the senses.” Camille suggests that the desire experienced in embodied viewing oªers homosexual collectors an outlet to express through things what cannot otherwise be spoken.114 Given Telfair’s “romantic friendship” with Mary Few, one cannot rule out the possibility that her joy in visual pleasure was linked to her sexuality. The two Marys had been confidants ever since their school days and remained in constant communication. Telfair’s letters convey her longing for her friend during their periods of separation. She lamented: “Oh! How I wish you were with me that we might talk walk eat & sleep together.”115 Several scholars caution that intimate female friendships in the nineteenth century should not necessarily be construed as sexual relationships.116 Al-

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

•

43

though there is no documentary evidence to indicate the precise nature of the relationship between Telfair and Few, it is clear that they shared their most intimate thoughts with each other. Women were increasingly thrown together during the Civil War while their fathers, husbands, and brothers were away. Although this presented them with an opportunity for unsupervised behavior and led to greater independence, it did not last. LeeAnn Whites maintains that former gender practices returned with renewed vigor in the South after the war as women tried to buttress the egos of defeated Confederate soldiers.117 Even though Union women were not faced with that delicate task in the victorious North, they had to contend with the ramifications of rapid industrialization and its accompanying ideology of separate spheres, which idealized the home and sanctified woman’s place in it. Caroll Smith-Rosenberg contends that the Industrial Revolution “erected the nonproductive woman into a symbol of bourgeois class hegemony” and formulated a cult of true womanhood, which idealized innocence, domesticity, and submissiveness.118 Barbara Welter first identified these characteristics in a foundational article of 1966 based on extensive research into women’s magazines and religious literature. She asserts that conformers were promised happiness and power, whereas transgressors were branded as enemies “of God, of civilization and of the Republic.”119 Subsequent scholars, while continuing to credit Welter for outlining the salient attitudes of the period, grant women more individual agency than she allowed, especially in their eªorts to transform their influence in the home into a voice that resonated in the public sphere.120 Nowhere is this more evident than in the world of art collecting, which drew more and more prosperous Gilded Age women out of the home. Considered a harmless ladylike pursuit, art appreciation was even encouraged by the monitors of socially acceptable behavior. In her study of women’s arts organizations, Karen Blair maintains that the “new generation of women was bred to acquire artistic interests— repositories of cultural frills that few men cared to cultivate.”121 Welter also notes that “artsy-crafty activity” such as needlework, drawing, and painting was deemed an appropriate leisure pursuit—appropriate, that is, as long as women did not attract attention to themselves.122 This injunction against visibility remained in force for the remainder of the nineteenth century. Women collectors learned to operate behind the scenes and to discreetly gather together choice objects that helped to alleviate their anxieties about their limited opportunities and humdrum daily lives. Operating under a mantle of invisibility, they succeeded in carrying on the antebellum woman’s encroachment on cultural space.

44

•

T H E P O L I T I C S O F C U LT U R A L S P A C E

TWO

Y A Conspiracy of Silence MARY SEXTON MORGAN • CATHARINE LORILLARD WOLFE MARIETTA REED STEVENS • ANNA BRECK ASPINWALL • ABIGAIL WHEATLEY BLODGETT CORNELIA CLINCH STEWART • ANNA WILSTACH • ALICE STURGIS HOOPER PAULINE AGASSIZ SHAW • SUSAN CLARKE WARREN • ISABELLA STEWART GARDNER

M

ORE THAN 100,000 NEW YORKERS previewed Mary Sexton Morgan’s collection before it was sold at auction over the course of four days in the spring of 1886, following her death the previous year at the age of fifty-five. Amazed that a woman with a passion for anonymity had reputedly spent a fortune on contemporary French paintings, Asian vases, Renaissance bronzes, lacquered snuªboxes, custom-designed silver, and rare orchids, the press initially questioned her sanity. One newspaper editorialized: “Mrs. Morgan was one of the most extravagant women of her time. She spent money with a lavishness that threw suspicion upon the condition of her mind.” Even her own lawyer was quoted as saying that her elevation “to the position of the leading patroness of art in America” perversely occurred when “her mental faculties were clouded.”1 Morgan’s extravagant consumption of luxury goods awoke the slumbering Puritan conscience and provoked latter-day moralists to conclude that her appetite for self-gratification was a sign of madness. Like Eliza Bowen Jumel, Morgan invited censure because she had vigorously inserted herself into the male discourse of possessive individualism and had claimed an unladylike degree of agency when she entered the marketplace and formed a collection that surpassed those of many of her male peers. The New York Times judged Morgan’s “treasures” superior to William H. Vanderbilt’s; its opinion was borne out when the sale of her goods totaled $1,205,090, establishing an auction record that would not be surpassed for another twenty-four years.2 Wonder continues to this day over how she managed to keep such an important collection secret.3

45

Mary Sexton Morgan was a virtual stranger to the public. Certainly, according to the dictates of the cult of true womanhood, the ideal woman was expected “to work in silence, unseen.”4 Morgan, however, demonstrated a curious tendency to go beyond this standard by making herself intentionally unnoticeable. Perhaps she realized instinctively that there is power in remaining invisible: visibility attracts surveillance and the laws of the patriarchy, whereas what is hidden resists control.5 Morgan laid in wait, amassed her holdings, and formed ambitious plans for her collection, but a sudden illness claimed her life before she could shed her carapace. Had Morgan not died intestate, thus causing her possessions to be sold at auction, it is likely that she would have been forgotten, like so many other nineteenth-century women who discreetly and quietly turned to art to satisfy the needs of their psyches. Also lost would have been the opportunity to unfurl the tight coils of her personal motivations. To comprehend why art played such an important role in the lives of women like Morgan, it is fruitful to supplement historical analysis with psychoanalytical interpretation. As Beth Newman argues, these approaches need not be mutually exclusive: “Historically produced and specific aspects of the social world, in the form of lived experience, social practices, and culturally powerful tropes and ideals, may serve as the props on which something in the psyche leans, and that contribute to its force.”6 In Morgan’s case, all of the posthumous attention paid to the precedent-shattering place of her collection in the annals of the art market disguises its origins in a private act by a complex woman. She spent years dreaming about becoming a collector, and when she finally achieved her goal, she interacted with her treasured objects through a ritual of imaginative play to negotiate between the invisible and the visible, fantasy and reality, and creativity and commodity. Kept on a strict allowance by her husband, Morgan is rumored to have indulged her fantasies by reading the Art Journal in bed at night, planning what she would buy when she had the money.7 Any property she owned at the time of her marriage in 1852 would have become Charles Morgan’s, since it was not until ten years later that the last of a series of Married Women’s Acts were passed by the State of New York, allowing women full access to the assets they brought to their marriage or acquired afterward by gift or bequest.8 But as far as her husband’s property was concerned, a married woman was invisible in the eyes of the law. In 1870 James Schouler commented on the unfairness of the law of coverture to the Gilded Age woman, admitting that it “sacrifices her property interests, and places her almost absolutely within her husband’s keeping. . . . The husband is permitted to lord it over the wife with a somewhat despotic sway.”9 Mary Morgan had no choice but to wait for the fortune she had been promised in her husband’s will. It was worth the wait. After the transportation tycoon died in 1878, she inherited $5 million and vigorously went about the task of forming the collection of her dreams. Long familiar with the wares of nearby art dealers on Madison Square and along Broadway, Morgan immediately put her plan into action. Shunning publicity, Morgan was protected by a conspiracy of silence among the deal-

46

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

ers she frequented, who realized that it was to their advantage to keep her purchases secret. Shortly after her death, the Philadelphia Times commented on this extraordinary occurrence: Seeing also that it was to their interest to keep all knowledge of the whereabouts and possessions of so rare and well feathered a bird to themselves, her name was hardly mentioned by the dealers, even in whispers, to their clerks, and many a young man employed in the leading picture stores and jewelry establishments wondered who the stout and pleasantfaced lady was who was so courteously received and deferentially shown into their private o‹ces by their employers.10

Significantly, one of the few known images of Morgan represents her in the act of inspecting a painting presented to her by one of the dealers who jealously guarded her custom, William Schaus (fig. 12). Although it is only a hasty sketch created to accompany the Philadelphia newspaper’s ebullient description of the sale of her possessions in its Sunday edition, it nonetheless revealingly portrays her as a discerning client, in contrast to those press accounts that claimed she was the pawn of unscrupulous dealers.11 Moreperceptive art critics noted that Morgan was indeed the discriminating collector depicted in this sketch. Charles Dana, editor of the New York Sun, initially dismissed Morgan as a profligate eccentric who crowded her house “like a pawnbroker’s shop, with such a profusion of . . . costly objects, that it more nearly resembled an overfilled storehouse than the abode of a reasonable being.” After taking the time to study her collection, however, he admitted that he was surprised to discover that it possessed “transcendent merit . . . good taste and high quality.”12 Even a dissenter like Dana found it di‹cult to dismiss Morgan’s taste as trivial after bidders on her 240 paintings and hundreds of objets d’art included Rothschilds from Paris and a bevy of American tycoons such as Collis Huntington of California, Cyrus McCormick of Chicago, and John G. Johnson of Philadelphia. A collector of Asian porcelain himself, Dana was one of the few critics who did not think the $18,000 that William Walters of Baltimore paid in a vigorous bidding contest for Morgan’s Peach Bloom Vase (plate 4) was exorbitant. An exquisitely designed product of the imperial kilns in 12. Sketch of Mary Sexton Morgan and William Schaus, Philadelphia Times, February 21, 1886.

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

47

China, dating from the early Qing dynasty, this vessel was particularly admired for its variegated pink glaze flecked with green. The New York Times begged to diªer with Dana, however: it ridiculed the vase’s inflated value in a poetic parody of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.” Titled “The Rime of the Peachblow Vase,” the verse concluded: And so it chanced that this red jug, Of diminutive dimensions, Will always be a fruitful source Of very grave dissensions.13

It is unlikely that Charles de Kay, the regular art critic for the New York Times, was the author of this rhyme, since he proved to be one of the most sympathetic observers of the Mary Morgan phenomenon, both in articles in the Times and in the biography he drafted of Thomas Kirby, one of the owners of the American Art Association gallery, located opposite Morgan’s home on Madison Square, which she frequented on an almost daily basis and where the sale of her possessions took place. Privy to personal information about Morgan through his connection with Kirby, de Kay wrote a well-balanced profile of the collector for the Magazine of Art. He conceded that Morgan “indulged in some of the virtuoso’s mistakes on beginning a collection without any wholesome restraints on the pursestrings,” but he went on to credit her with developing a “taste of her own.” De Kay, it seems, was also interested in the psychological reasons that compelled Morgan to become a collector, musing: “A strong passion seldom arises in old age unless circumstances have thwarted it earlier.”14 While he may have been specifically referring to the fact that Morgan’s husband had not given her su‹cient funds to indulge in collecting, his reference to “thwarted” passions suggests a deeper level of discontent. Psychoanalysts contend that we often turn to objects to resolve anxiety. Beginning in infancy with the “object cathexis” described by Freud, the emotional energy invested in the mother is transferred to external objects in her absence. These become symbols of warmth and comfort and aid the child in the process of separation and identity formation.15 Melanie Klein also believed that when an attachment to objects continues in adulthood, it is often driven by a need for recognition, respect, and self-esteem.16 To Morgan, this process of individuation must have been particularly poignant because she had contributed to her husband’s success by working as his confidential assistant and bookkeeper, yet all their assets except for their house were in his name. As a result, she was forced to defer her desire to surround herself with objects that would later help her achieve a sense of independence and personal stability. Morgan’s alternative was to fantasize about owning the splendid items she saw in magazines and dealers’ showrooms.17 Fantasy, according to Freud, is driven by unsatisfied desires and “contains the fulfillment of a wish, and improves on unsatisfactory reality.”18 Morgan and other women like her who had no professional or creative outlet had ample time to escape into lushly decorated dream worlds. James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen

48

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

of the Six Marks (fig. 4) was the first in a long line of paintings of contemplative women in interior settings by artists such as William Merritt Chase, Edmund Tarbell, and others prior to female emancipation. Recognizing the ubiquity of this wistful type, Thomas Wilmer Dewing paid homage to Whistler’s image almost sixty years later in his Lady in Gold (plate 5).19 Although the autumnal tones of Dewing’s artfully arranged interior are more muted than Whistler’s and cast a shadowy veil over his subject’s imaginary world, little has changed in the intimate rendition of a woman in a trancelike reverie among her treasured possessions. Daydreaming was apparently a staple of Morgan’s existence. Sociologists, as well as psychologists, maintain that make-believe, or “as-ifness,” is a vital aspect of collecting. Jean Baudrillard claims that a collection transports its owner beyond the prosaic everyday world into the realm of the poetic and the imaginary.20 This observation perhaps explains why even after Morgan’s inheritance allowed her to make the leap from wistful wanting to tangible ownership, she continued to enact the ritual of imaginative play as a bridge between fantasy and reality. Morgan found comfort in playing with her art treasures as she struggled to make the transition from dutiful wife to independent widow. Her possessions presented a means to work through her anxieties and strengthen her resolve. Morgan’s approach to collecting as a form of play was apparent to Montague Marks, the astute editor of the Art Amateur. He observed: She lived with her precious toys as if they were her most beloved companions. Every day the pieces on her table were changed. Whatever her occupation for the hour might be, some favorite bit of porcelain, jade or other beautiful object had to be placed near her, so that she might enjoy the color or the perfection of the glaze, or delight in exquisite workmanship.21

What must she have thought as her fingers glided over the creamy skin of a porcelain vase or lingered on a cool jade carving? Was her reflection shadowed on these smooth surfaces? Was it during these moments that she daydreamed about the future and envisioned the life she wished to lead? Morgan would have found encouragement for this process of dreaming over art and letting her mind roam freely in the books she owned by the British art critic and art historian Anna Jameson.22 Jameson mocked the disinterested posture of male connoisseurs and defended women’s emotional response to art, declaring: “I can only see with woman’s eyes, and think and feel as I believe every woman must, whatever her love for the arts.”23 She contended that intense absorption in paintings, as well as decorative objects, set in motion a soothing and beneficial chain of associations in the mind of the viewer. In her Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London (1844), a copy of which was in Morgan’s library, Jameson advised: “Pictures are for use, for solace, for ornament, for parade. . . . there are those who collect pictures for love, for companionship, for communion; to whom each picture, well-chosen at first, unfolds new beauties—becomes dear every day.”24 Also pertinent to Morgan’s development as an independent individual was

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

49

Jameson’s belief that aesthetic education was essential to women’s liberation. Criticizing Harriet Martineau for not paying attention to this facet of women’s development, Jameson considered museums “important institutions for the elaboration of feminist principles: laboratories for feminism as well as potential havens of sexual equality and independent judgment for women.”25 Although Morgan did not become involved in the suªrage movement, she did plan to create a museum of her own. The New York Times reported that shortly before her death Morgan had been “preparing the nucleus for a museum,” explaining that “she not only tried to buy a house adjoining her own in order to fit it up as a museum, but had begun to put on paper a scheme for such a public-spirited move when she was taken with her last illness.”26 Such a bold gesture indicates that Morgan had made the transition from passive dreamer to active agent and was preparing to move from invisibility to visibility. Having spent the seven years since she came into her inheritance expanding her spatial map and gaining confidence in her judgment by exploring her psyche through collecting-as-play, Morgan intended to emerge from her shell and make her debut in a cultural space of her own making. Had she succeeded in founding a museum in the house next door to her own, its domestic setting and décor would have redefined the narrow notion of the collection as a rationally conceived sequence of high-art paintings and sculpture. What had begun as a fantasy collection in Morgan’s mind had taken tangible shape in a well-balanced arrangement of objets d’art and paintings that confirmed that the fine and decorative arts could coexist in a harmonious ensemble. Despite the unfortunate loss of the photographs taken of Morgan’s home just before her possessions were moved across Madison Square to be auctioned at the American Art Association, detailed descriptions of what she owned still make it possible to envision how both parts of her collection enhanced and complemented each other. In the months preceding her death, Morgan had become interested in American art and had purchased several paintings by Albert Pinkham Ryder.27 Their abstract patterns and richly enameled surfaces would have blended with her glazed Chinese ceramics and lacquered snuªboxes, connecting the objects on her walls, sideboards, tables, and shelves. One can imagine how Ryder’s tawny tints and luminous varnishes found resonance with Morgan’s own designs in gold and silver and warmed the tender rose and mossy green glaze of her Peach Bloom Vase. This sympathetic correspondence between possessions eªectively bridged the gap between the “lesser” and “higher” arts and dissolved the arbitrary aesthetic hierarchy that ranked the two separately. Moreover, this correspondence illustrates the significance of play theory in explaining the collecting pattern of women, like Morgan, who clarified their sense of self through spontaneous interactions with enchanted objects in the privacy of their homes before gathering the courage to move outward into the cultural arena. The benefits of imaginative play are a staple of therapeutic literature, from Freud, who saw it as an avenue to wish fulfillment, to Klein, who viewed it as a release for angst, to a raft of contemporary scholars.28 Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, for instance, in their com-

50

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

prehensive study The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self, maintain that “in play the values of terminal materialism may be temporarily subverted, and one can directly experience how it would be if we lived by diªerent rules.”29 Interpreted from this perspective, the way in which Morgan made use of her collection demonstrates not only that her possessions had a psychological utility that exceeded their worth as commodities, but that objects to her were a springboard for a fantasy life free of social taboos. Her restless arrangement and rearrangement of her treasures also suggests that this playful practice was a form of creativity. The creative potential of playing has been explored by a host of psychiatrists, philosophers, and historians, ranging from Friedrich Schiller in the eighteenth century, who, in his On the Aesthetic Education of Man, argued that the plastic arts originated in an innate “play-instinct,” to Klein, who viewed the act of play itself as a creative process. Although Johan Huizinga disdained psychology in his classic tome Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture, he nevertheless acknowledged the primacy of play in aesthetic expression.30 Rather than dismissing the play instinct as a childish phase, these scholars have recognized its fundamental connection to the creative process. D. W. Winnicott was more concerned with the psychoanalytic ramifications of play in relation to the soothing property of transitional objects, but he nevertheless arrived at a conclusion that was similar but more forceful than Huizinga’s. He insisted that playing was the site of creative expression, declaring: “It is only here, in this unintegrated state of the personality, that that which we describe as creative can appear.” He adds: “Creative playing . . . eventually adds up to a cultural life.”31 While Morgan’s interactions with her collection may thus be considered a type of creative play, her creativity assumed a more conventionally defined form when she began to design her own objets d’art. One of her obituaries reported that she was especially fond of articles crafted in silver and gold, noting that “her hallways and rooms were filled with unique and costly articles of this description, many of them her own design.” The same source described one of the elaborate sketches that she had turned over to Tiªany’s to have executed: “a group of mounted Indians, with lassos in the air, pursuing a herd of buªalo.”32 This impulse to stamp a collection with individual creativity was not uncommon among women. Henrietta Caswell Smith, for instance, painted a copy of JeanFrançois Millet’s celebrated religious work The Angelus on a gold satin portiere that hung in the Moorish archway between the art gallery and library in her New York home (fig. 13). Married to a trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art who collected French and German realist paintings, Smith integrated the fine and decorative arts in her home in a tactile manner.33 Many women, in other words, were not content with buying readymade works of art, but filled their immediate environments with their own creative endeavors as well. The link between art, play, and creativity was a feature of nineteenth-century discussions of the decorative arts. Clarence Cook, in The House Beautiful (1877), advised his readers that children’s aesthetic sensibilities could be stimulated by giving them a fine-crafted

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

51

13. Portiere painted by Henrietta Caswell Smith after François Millet’s The Angelus, Henrietta and Charles Smith residence, New York, 1883. From Artistic Houses (New York: Appleton, 1883–84), part 2, facing p. 129.

piece of Japanese ivory or a small bronze animal to play with. Sharing Charles Baudelaire’s belief that toys are “a child’s earliest initiation to art,” he recommended that wellcrafted objects be located in such a position that the children of the house would be able to look at and handle them (in much the same way that Morgan intimately interacted with her “toys”), and then substituted on a daily basis, so that the children might develop “taste and delicacy of perception.”34 Although Cook directed his pedagogical argument to the aesthetic education of children, his advice would have been equally applicable to those female readers whose domestic circumstance made them as dependent as children and as in need of comfort. Because of the importance Cook attached to the role of well-chosen articles in educating the senses, he riled at the suggestion that decorative objects were mere curios. He pronounced: “Our senses are educated more by these slight impressions than we are apt to think; and bric-à-brac, so much despised by certain people, and often justly so, may have a use that they themselves might not unwillingly admit.”35 It was this very use value that made the decorative arts a site of contention in the nineteenth century. Fine art, according to Kantian aesthetics, required a disinterested observer to appreciate its intellectual and nonutilitarian qualities, rather than an emotionally engaged participant who projected her feelings onto the object.36 By this token, the pair of women represented in Elliott

52

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

14. Elliott Daingerfield, A Quaint Oriental Shop, 1885, oil on canvas, Collection of Morris and Wendy Evans.

Daingerfield’s painting A Quaint Oriental Shop (fig. 14) would have been judged guilty of lacking objective distance. Their hunched shoulders convey their emotional engagement as they lean forward in deep concentration to study a selection of items that connoisseurs of the higher arts would have dismissed as bric-a-brac. Just one year after Cook’s book appeared, the British Art Journal expressed alarm over “the fashion for forming collections of bric-a-brac” in England, noting that “the mania has secured a foothold in New York” and specifically citing the exorbitant prices paid for tiny vessels like Morgan’s Peach Bloom Vase.37 Ten years earlier, Charles Locke Eastlake had blamed women for the deterioration of domestic taste. His Hints on Household Taste first appeared in England in 1868 and over the next decade was repeatedly reprinted in America. Eastlake claimed that women were mistaken in believing they possessed “the faculty of distinguishing good from bad design in the familiar objects of daily life.”38

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

53

No doubt it was this pervasive bias against the decorative arts that resulted in the omission of Morgan’s collection from the first major survey of art collecting in America. Earl Shinn (fig. 15) crossed the continent on the new transcontinental railway to visit almost two hundred private collections for his three-volume tome The Art Treasures of America (1879–82). Although Morgan had only begun to form her collection when Shinn published his first volume, she was well on her way by the time he wrote his final installment on her home ground in New York. How could he have ignored a collection as vast as Morgan’s? Tim Dolan oªers a plausible explanation when he observes that “the female collection . . . was virtually invisible as a cultural pursuit because it was considered meaningful only within the home.”39 To Shinn, however, the problem was the growing visibility of women’s taste rather than its invisibility. He expressed his disdain for the ingression of the decorative arts in the homes he toured. Though he reviewed John Jacob Astor’s paintings, for instance, he refused to write about Augusta Astor’s celebrated collection of laces, decreeing that “bric-à-brac is hardly a fit subject for the present notice.”40 Shinn’s vehemence only increased over the ensuing decade as he witnessed the success of the American adaptation of the British Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements in elevating the so-called “lesser arts” to the level of the fine arts. He orotundly pronounced that the “decorative mania” was a “destructive angel” that was “turning orderly homes into bristling and impenetrable curiosity-shops.”41 To understand Shinn’s intractable stance, one must consider how deeply entrenched the hierarchy of the arts was in the American art world. When John Trumbull renamed the American Academy as the American Academy of Fine Arts in 1817, he a‹rmed his allegiance to the European valorization of painting and sculpture as the highest forms of art. First formulated in the art academies of the Renaissance, this distinction separated the utilitarian crafts from the spiritually uplifting fine arts. The use value of the decorative arts, whether practical or psychological, was said to prevent them from becoming transcendent, and they were accordingly placed on the bottom rung of the hierarchy of the arts. Georg Hegel, in the lectures he delivered on art between 1818 and 1831, continued to endorse the Kantian viewpoint that high art was superior on the grounds that it spoke to the intellect, unlike art objects used “to decorate our surroundings, to impact pleasantness.”42 That Shinn adopted a Hegelian line of reasoning in his Art Treasures

15. Earl Shinn [Edward Strahan], n.d. From Josia H. Shinn, The History of the Shinn Family in Europe and America (Washington, DC: Genealogical and Historical Publishing Company, 1903), facing p. 48.

54

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

of America is apparent not only in his elevation of the fine arts, but also in his ambitious goal of proving that the American zeitgeist had evolved to a level comparable with Europe’s. Shinn’s adherence to the doctrines of European aesthetics had been established at their source. Initially intending to become a painter, he joined the crowd of aspiring American artists who were dissatisfied with the training available to them at home and went abroad in the 1860s.43 Shinn studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris and on his return to the United States became a foremost apologist for the value system of the Parisian art world, which viewed the decorative arts as inferior arts de la femme, in contrast to the more intellectual, and thus masculine, fine arts.44 In The Art Treasures of America, he championed the art of French academic painters such as Alexandre Cabanel, William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Ernest Meissonier, and Jean-Léon Gérôme, with whom he studied, as well as the more naturalistic Barbizon painters, including Millet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot in France and their counterparts in Belgium and Holland.45 Shinn presented the American collections that counted works by these artists among their holdings as models for other collectors to imitate. When he visited William Walters’s collection in Baltimore, for instance, he lectured his readers on the importance of progressing beyond a taste for subject matter to an appreciation of style, explaining that while “a collector always begins his career from subject,” he gradually ascends “to those regions of pure and serene connoisseurship where subject is discarded altogether and mastership of quality reigns supreme” (1:93). Shinn’s a‹rmation of connoisseurship and the superiority of painting over the decorative arts was consistent with his goal of elevating the nation’s taste. From his perch as chief art critic for the Nation, Shinn observed that America’s economic recovery following the Civil War was coupled with a keen interest on the part of its successful entrepreneurs in acquiring cultural capital. His mission in writing The Art Treasures of America was to demonstrate that these new businessmen-collectors had attained aesthetic expertise and to encourage others to follow their example so that the United States might win international recognition for its cultural judgment. He prophesied that the modern art that his fellow citizens had amassed to date, as documented in his threevolume study, would be seen to be on a par with the great collections of the Vatican and the Louvre. He gingerly asserted: This work presents, it will be seen, America’s “case” as an art collector. I believe its pages will surprise the best informed expert by showing what a proportion of the highest genius finds a home on these shores. For the art of the old masters we have to go to the Vatican and Louvre. But there is a great modern art, which is the development of this century, and for which it is to be accountable for posterity—an art plainly modified by the industrial and practical spirit of the age, but modified just as plainly by its intelligence, and by the application of that scientific treatment which is changing history, physics and creeds beneath our eyes. For this art, on which posterity will sit in equity, America will be the judgmenthall, for its Vaticans and Louvres are here. (1:vi)

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

55

Writing just as the Reconstruction period following the Civil War was coming to an end, Shinn was keen to project an image of America as a unified nation with a flourishing culture. He reiterated this point five years later in his catalogue of William H. Vanderbilt’s collection when he noted that “the country, at this moment, is just beginning to be astonishing” and, after the divisiveness of the civil conflict, had now become “re-cemented.”46 It follows that Shinn saw the need for a stable hierarchy of the arts that reflected America’s solidarity as a nation in the eyes of the world. In keeping with the patriotic task he defined for himself, Shinn launched his Art Treasures of America in the nation’s capital. He began by extolling the virtues of William Wilson Corcoran for having recently endowed the museum that still bears his name, dubbing him a “modern Maecenas” and a “great example” to his fellow countrymen.47 Shinn was genuinely proud of what had been accomplished by men like Corcoran in the little more than a hundred years that had passed since America’s inception. By equating postbellum art collections with advancements in American industry, science, and intellectual life, Shinn expressed a worldview that had originated in the Enlightenment belief in universal human progress and was accelerated by the Gilded Age’s obsession with invention and industrialization.48 Women were excluded from this modern miracle by virtue of their subjective response to objects and preference for “unscientific” ensembles rather than taxonomic sequences that endorsed the logic underlying the hierarchy of the arts. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock have called attention to the gender hierarchy that was implicit in this ranking of values. They emphasized its implications in their groundbreaking study Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology: Painting and sculpture enjoy an elevated status while other arts that adorn people, homes or utensils are relegated to a lesser cultural sphere under such terms as “applied,” “decorative” or “lesser” arts. This hierarchy is maintained by attributing to the decorative arts a lesser degree of intellectual eªort or appeal and a greater concern with manual skill and utility. . . . the art of men can only maintain its dominance and privilege on the pages of art history by having a negative to its positive, a feminine to its unacknowledged masculine.49

Although these values were inculcated in Shinn by his European training, he proved to be more receptive to the changes in the American art market than other critics. In 1870 Henry Tuckerman saw fit to omit females entirely from the list of collectors he appended to his Book of the Artists. Shinn, however, did not ignore the fact that by the time he published the first volume of The Art Treasures of America in 1879, women had become a significant presence on the American cultural scene. In the same year that Shinn launched The Art Treasures of America, Montague Marks, the prescient editor of the Art Amateur, asserted: “The influence exercised by ladies on the formation of modern art has never been fully realized by art-historians. It was very great, and the medium through which it made itself felt was the household.”50 As an oc-

56

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

casional contributor to Marks’s journal, Shinn would have been aware of this phenomenon; accordingly, he did not restrict The Art Treasures of America exclusively to collections of businessmen and industrialists, but also documented those belonging to twenty-two women who, he ascertained, appreciated the “higher” arts of painting and sculpture. From the vantage point of the twenty-first century, there are many explanations for why the postbellum American woman’s contribution to the cultural arena was finally recognized. Pioneering collectors like Eliza Jumel and Mary Telfair, along with educators such as Sarah Worthington Peter and Ednah Dow Cheney, had chipped away at the barrier that blocked women’s participation in the arts. Expediting this transition, consumer culture eªected a “gendering of geography” by enticing women to make more frequent forays into the marketplace. As Elizabeth Langland argues, Victorian women occupied a complex subject position that shifted between passive acceptance of the invisibility advocated by patriarchal social structures and a desire to visibly display the wealth and refinement of their class. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe designated woman the “minister of a family state” in their influential advice manual, The American Woman’s Home (1869), which they dedicated “to the Women of America, in whose hands rest the real destinies of the republic.”51 Charged with representing the nation by beautifying the home and keeping up appearances, women were authorized to expend economic capital in order to enrich America’s cultural capital. An astute critic such as Shinn would not have missed their increasing involvement in galleries, exhibitions, and museums. A further explanation for Shinn’s attention to women rests with his Quaker heritage, which made him more conscious of females’ status as independent entities due to the Society of Friends’ acceptance of equality between the sexes. Believing that “the Spirit made no sexual distinction in choosing human agents through whom to speak,” Quakers had admitted women into their ministry since the seventeenth century. At the time when Shinn was writing his Art Treasures of America, female Quakers were pressuring their male brethren to do away with segregated meetings and to appoint women to the ruling Representative Committee.52 Shinn felt conflicted about his Quaker background, however. Born Edward Strahan, he published his art criticism pseudonymously in order not to embarrass his parents, who, in keeping with their faith, were opposed to the celebration of graven images. This legacy probably contributed to his bias against ornately decorated interiors, which may have invoked in him the Puritan values of self-denial and restraint he had been taught to abide by as a youth. As Jackson Lears notes, this moralizing attitude was “a long tradition in Anglo-American Protestant culture: the Puritan’s plain-speak assault on theatrical artifice and eªete display.”53 Although Shinn had turned his back on his religious upbringing when he decided to become an artist and branched out into writing criticism, he never overcame his aversion to expensive ornaments. He failed to realize that the aesthetic achievement he praised in the American modern Maecenases who were responsible for the growth of the economy was dependent on the female consumers who embellished the home.

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

57

What cannot be explained, however, is why he chose the particular group of collectors who appear in The Art Treasures of America. His surviving correspondence is disappointingly silent on this point. One can only assume that a variety of factors contributed to Shinn’s anointing this specific roster of men and women as America’s leading collectors: recommendations by word of mouth, personal appeals on the part of proud possessors, contacts provided by the editors of the journals for whom he wrote, and, last but not least, advice from the publishers of The Art Treasures of America, Gebbie and Barrie of Philadelphia.54 Shinn’s omission of Morgan’s collection suggests that he was not an intimate of the dealers she frequented. Despite his many bylines in the Nation, Lippincott’s Magazine, Art Amateur, and the New York Evening Post, Shinn described himself, in 1882, while still at work on The Art Treasures, as “a poor scribbler in a little room at the top of a lodging house.” That his situation did not improve is evident by his plaintive description of himself four years later, in a letter he wrote just six weeks before his death: “As it is I am always poor, have no good clothes, and eat the coarsest and cheapest food that can be bought.”55 The son of the secretary of the Philadelphia Bricklayer’s Association, Shinn apparently did not move in the same social circles as the dealers he visited professionally. Although he was a founding member of the recreational Tile Club, he was basically a loner: his obituary in the Art Amateur noted that “few persons, even in New York art circles, where he was really a power, knew him personally.”56 Nor was Shinn like the “new” critics described by H. Wayne Morgan, who were part of an art world support structure that included commercial galleries, auction houses, art institutions, social clubs, art schools, and art colonies.57 Given Shinn’s outsider status, it is unlikely that the well-connected and successful dealer Samuel Putnam Avery confided in him about the significant sales he was making to Mary Morgan.58 The two diªered in their attitude toward the decorative arts, and perhaps Avery suspected that, because Shinn was a regular contributor to the Art Amateur, he was the anonymous author who had criticized the quality of some ceramics the dealer had sold to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.59 In any case, there was a vast gulf between their experience and status: Avery was appointed a commissioner to the fine arts section of the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1867 while Shinn was living there as an impoverished art student, and he was also a trustee of the prestigious Metropolitan Museum of Art from the time of its inception in 1870. A well-established art world insider, Avery would have had no incentive to make the penurious Shinn aware that women represented an untapped market for the arts. Avery catered to incipient female collectors by staging special events for them, such as the “Ladies’ Private View” he sponsored in 1877, in space he rented at Leavitt Art Rooms. Although Avery had opened his own gallery a few blocks away in 1865 with the backing of the collector William Walters, he occasionally hired George Leavitt’s larger gallery for special exhibitions.60 The delicately flowered invitation to the event pointedly specified “No Gentlemen,” presumably because Avery did not want them to distract or influence

58

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

16–17. Ticket to “Ladies’ Private View” (front and back) presented by Samuel Putnam Avery at Leavitt Art Rooms, New York, 1877, Collection of The New-York Historical Society, negatives 72694S–72695S.

his potential clients (figs. 16 and 17). This exclusion would have had the combined eªect of making female customers feel more comfortable in a less competitive atmosphere and ensuring that they were a captive audience for Avery’s ministrations. In a portrait painted of Avery in 1876, he is shown giving his full attention to a female client he has succeeded in attracting to his gallery (plate 6). In contrast to Leavitt’s austerely arranged gallery (fig. 18), Avery furnished his to resemble a private home. He appropriated the style common to feminine interiors, using portieres, wall sconces, Asian porcelain, and the soft lighting of a chandelier to knit together his stock of paintings and decorative arts. His biographers note that “the curiosities and decorative objects” he displayed “drew as many clients as did the paintings.”61 Avery was not the only dealer to commercialize women’s propensity for the decorative: Michael Knoedler also refurbished his upstairs rooms in 1876 to resemble the domestic environments of the women he hoped to entice into his gallery.62 Furthermore, Thomas Kirby at the American Art Association added a cozy window nook where female browsers could sit and contemplate the art on oªer (fig. 19).63 Avery’s portrait provides a fascinating insight into the extent dealers were willing to go to cater to women collectors. Avery is shown patiently presenting a small gold-framed painting for the inspection of an elegantly attired matron, who has already perused the

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

59

18. James Sabin, “The Leavitt Art Rooms, 817 Broadway, New York,” c. 1882–83, The New-York Historical Society, New York, negative 70960.

canvases that have been brought out for her from the storeroom and are now haphazardly stacked against the doorframe and wall of the back room. She leans forward, holding a magnifying glass to better focus on the tiny canvas, which is angled away from our view. In this intense moment of aesthetic scrutiny, her credibility as a serious collector is established. This tableau of accommodating dealer and judicious female client bears an uncanny resemblance to the Philadelphia Times’s sketch of Mary Morgan with the dealer William Schaus and testifies to the deference with which art merchants treated the women who were becoming an increasingly significant source of their income. Avery assiduously cultivated Morgan as a client, fixing a broken magnifying glass for her, sending her books and photographs, taking her to see the home of his most important client, William H. Vanderbilt, and oªering to arrange a private visit to the collection inherited by the recently widowed Mary McCrea Stuart.64 His letters to her are masterpieces of persuasion: he told Morgan that since she had already 19. American Art Association gallery, New York, illustrated in Harper’s Weekly, November 15, 1884, 750. Photo: HarpWeek LLC.

60

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

acquired the best other dealers had to oªer, she owed it to herself to take his prime selections. Avery reasoned: You have got the cream of what Mssrs Schaus, and Knoedler had, so that now I really hold the finest paintings for sale in the country, several of which would elevate the standard of your collection of a high degree . . . so that I may truly say that whoever secures the pick of what I now have, will make a most fortunate hit, which every year will confirm.65

Avery went on to invite Morgan to come into his gallery to view works by Millet, Meissonier, Cabanel, and a number of other French painters. His eªorts proved fruitful: he had the pleasure of selling Morgan the painting that would fetch the highest price at her sale—Jules Breton’s The Communicants, which he commissioned the artist to paint especially for her.66 Avery also flattered Morgan by requesting loans from her collection to display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, saying, “You should have your name recorded among its ‘patrons.’”67 As we have seen, however, the secretive Morgan had plans of her own in this direction. Her ambition to found a museum makes her omission in Shinn’s volumes all the more surprising. Yet while he was apparently unaware of her, she was well aware of him: Morgan purchased a copy of The Art Treasures of America, despite her exclusion from its pages.68 Even though few of the twenty-two women Shinn consented to include in The Art Treasures of America matched Morgan’s ambitious reach, it behooves us to examine them because they oªer a heuristic model of women collectors in the middle to late decades of the nineteenth century. Like Morgan, several discovered the paradoxical truth that collecting for the home could lead to the greater outside world of public engagement. Virtually nothing has been written about these women, although they provide a readymade sample for a study of patterns of female collecting in the Gilded Age. There are too many gaps in the scant documentation on these twenty-two lives to produce a linear history like that constructed for the male collectors of this period. The backgrounds of the almost two hundred men Shinn visited can be easily studied in biographic dictionaries and histories of their communities or businesses, whereas the identities of the women he mentions must be extracted from the uncut fabric of time. Still, su‹cient details about the nine widows, three spinsters, and ten married women in Shinn’s Art Treasures of America can be excavated from family histories, obituaries, newspaper notices, and auction sales to begin construction of a gendered theory of collecting and women’s contribution to American culture.69 This group of women experienced girlhood in antebellum America and adulthood in the Gilded Age and were thus subject to the stultifying dictates of the cult of true womanhood, which firmly situated them in the home. Even though the Gilded Age woman collector had begun to experience the independence that was the hallmark of female agency in the cultural sphere, she was not yet a free agent. Her identity was bracketed by the tan-

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

61

talizing freedoms represented by the act of negotiating for cherished objects and the routine duties that beckoned her back to home and hearth. It was there, in that intimate space, where she attempted to define herself by reflecting on the new experiences that had penetrated the boundaries between private and public space she had been bred to respect. As I have already suggested in the case of Mary Morgan, women often enacted this process of individuation through the ritual of daydreaming and playing with their possessions. Domestic space, according to philosopher Pierre Bachelard, is the terrain of intimacy where one can revisit the imaginary world discovered in childhood. In The Poetics of Space, he observes that, “by dreaming on childhood, we return to the lair of reveries . . . which have opened up the world to us, it is reverie which makes us the first inhabitant of the world of solitude.”70 Thrown back on themselves by the dictates of convention, many Victorian women relied on their precious possessions to transport them into the realm of reveries. Several of the women Shinn visited, notably Catharine Lorillard Wolfe and Phoebe Apperson Hearst, retreated into the inner sanctums they had created for themselves, where they interacted with their collections in much the same way that Morgan enacted the process of individuation by reflecting on her unspoken desires. Because almost half of the twenty-two women whose collections Shinn reviewed were widows, they might be construed as mere caretakers of their deceased husbands’ collections. It is true that some filled this role, such as Susan Endicott Roberts of New York, whose elderly husband’s collection was fully formed at the time of their marriage.71 But it would be misleading to draw the conclusion that all the widows in Shinn’s survey were uninterested in art: several were awakened to the rewards of collecting only after the death of their spouse, when they discovered, as Morgan had, that sovereignty over the self was possible for women who had unrestricted access to their own funds. Thus it is not surprising that the eight New York women Shinn visited were all widowed or unmarried.72 By excluding the decorative arts from his survey (with the notable exception of Wolfe), Shinn was led to those women whose independence allowed them greater freedom to explore collecting in the field of modern painting than married women had. Another reason for Shinn’s exclusion of married women collectors in New York rests in the sheer number of collectors in that city. He visited New York several times while writing his three volumes (remarkably, missing Morgan each time), ultimately producing descriptions of more than fifty collections. This profusion of riches in the city, the undisputed leader in the conspicuous consumption that characterized the post–Civil War years, was already apparent in the 1860s, leading James Jackson Jarves to quip: “Private galleries in New York are becoming almost as common as private stables.”73 Therefore a collection in this competitive environment had to be particularly remarkable by Shinn’s standards to warrant inclusion. Married women fared better away from the metropolis: Shinn credited seven married women (rather than their husbands) with the formation of fine-art collections on his travels westward. In New York, however, the aesthetic contributions of guardians of the hearth such as Augusta Astor, Maria Vanderbilt, Caroline Bel-

62

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

mont, and Frances Morgan were overshadowed by their husbands, even though each was involved in the decoration of her home.74 Shinn could not disregard the incontrovertible evidence of women’s independent consumption of art provided by the spinsters he visited in New York, however. Catharine Lorillard Wolfe was the only woman to whom he devoted a full chapter in his threevolume tome. Although it was her extensive collection of modern European paintings that won her admission to his pages, for once he was struck by the harmony a woman had created between the fine and decorative arts. Shinn could not help but notice that the decorative arts in Wolfe’s home expressed the personality of its owner. He wrote: Evidences of the most advanced ‘collectorship’ are everywhere visible, expressed in ivories, enamels and faience; their usefulness is to give a home character to the interior, and take away from the public-gallery or museum air which might otherwise be conferred by walls so completely covered with canvases. . . . the art almost insensibly melts and merges into the bric-à-brac and the furniture. Statues like Toussaint’s “Egyptian” and “Fellah Woman,” fine and thoroughly artistic works as eªorts of plastic study, are utilized as lamp-bearers. (1:134)

Despite his bias against bric-a-brac, Shinn realized that the objects in Wolfe’s home were not inanimate props, but served a purposeful function in her life. Unattuned to the psychological bond that women formed with objects in their homes, he was nevertheless not too far oª the mark when he noted that personal possessions had the capacity to convey character. As Harriet Beecher Stowe observed, a woman’s “home passes the charm that once was thrown around her person. . . . Her home is the new impersonation of herself.”75 Perhaps because Shinn spent more time reviewing Wolfe’s collection than that of any other woman in his series, he allowed himself to appreciate the important role that personally selected objects played in her life. No doubt his awareness of the synthesis between Wolfe’s decorative and fine art was reinforced by the still-life painting she commissioned from Blaise-Alexandre Desgoªe, featuring her favorite objets d’art in the Louvre, which included a Louis XIV sardonyx ewer and vase artfully aligned beside a gold Napoleonic dagger.76 Moreover, the fact that Wolfe inverted the hierarchy of values by transforming fine-art sculptures into ornamental lamps did not prevent Shinn from concluding that her decorations were “of the highest order.” Shinn, in this single instance, attributed a use value to the decorative arts that surpassed their worth as collectibles. Furthermore, he insightfully identified the air of intimacy created by Wolfe’s objects and her personal manner of displaying them, which echo the female pattern of collecting we have seen in Morgan’s gesamtkunstwerk. Shinn’s lengthy discussion of Wolfe’s possessions provides an alternative case study of the importance of art-induced fantasy in expanding gender roles. Although Wolfe and Morgan were neighbors on Madison Square, their lives followed diªerent trajectories.

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

63

The generous allowance the unmarried Wolfe received from her parents made it possible for her to avoid the frustrations experienced by Morgan during her marriage, but more di‹cult to escape surveillance. A true daughter of capitalism, Wolfe was said to be the richest single woman in America after she inherited two well-established mercantile fortunes. From her mother, Dorothea Ann Lorillard, who died in 1866, she inherited the extensive tobacco holdings that her French Huguenot ancestors had accumulated in the South. Six years later her father, John David Wolfe, passed on to her substantial rental property and a wholesale hardware enterprise in New York, which he had inherited from his father, who had served in the Revolutionary War under George Washington. As a result, Catharine Wolfe was said to be “the richest maiden lady in the United States,” with a fortune estimated at $12 million.77 Given the means, she quickly set out to establish a distinctive identity for herself, skillfully cultivating a public persona and deflecting interest from her personal life. Wolfe continued her father’s philanthropic practices by making donations to charity that averaged $250,000 annually. Her pattern of giving was quite her own, however. She did present a collection of shells and rare books on conchology to the American Museum of Natural History, where her father had been founding president, but she supported international organizations that had not appealed to him as well, such as the American chapels in Rome and Paris, the American school in Athens, and an archaeological expedition to Babylonia, demonstrating the more cosmopolitan attitude of the Gilded Age Americans of her generation.78 In New York, Wolfe also gave generously to an idiosyncratic collection of charities, including St. Philip’s, an African American church; the Italian Mission; and the Newsboys’ Lodging House. In addition to tithing part of her income to fashionable Grace Church, Wolfe bequeathed funds to found Grace House, a place of learning for the poor equipped with reading and lecture rooms, with the stipulation that part of her bequest be used for “some form of woman’s work,” a mission that is continued today by the Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club.79 Wolfe’s support of women in particular distinguishes her philanthropy from her father’s, as does her matronage of the arts. In a bold move to claim a separate self, she drew on her mother’s inheritance to establish herself as a dominant presence at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, across the park from the museum her father had headed. She was the only woman among its 106 charter subscribers in 1870. On her death in 1887, she bequeathed her collection of paintings to the museum, along with a monetary bequest of $200,000. In her study of philanthropy, Kathleen McCarthy concludes that women played an extremely limited role in rendering gifts before the 1890s, adding that the few who did make donations tended to bestow decorative arts, rather than paintings or cash. Augusta Astor, for instance, gave her collection of laces to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, while Elizabeth Coles bequeathed it her Gobelin tapestries and porcelain.80 The fact that Wolfe preferred to imitate male rather than female practices suggests that she wished to claim a more broadly gendered identity for herself. Left to her own devices after her father’s death in 1872, Wolfe cultivated an identity

64

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

that was far more complex than that of the stereotypically cowering and passive Victorian spinster. Her subjectivity was shaped by the social and cultural norms of the Gilded Age, but she stretched the boundaries of genteel femininity by venturing into the worlds of male patrons, philanthropists, attorneys, and accountants, where she quickly learned to defend her interests. She is a prime example of Mary Ryan’s contention that Victorian women, contrary to the long-standing assumptions about the Western gender system, transgressed the invisible border between private and public space. According to her contemporaries, Wolfe met with her financial advisers every morning and could be brusque and curt when her wishes were not carried out to the letter. At the same time, though, she was widely admired for her femininity.81 These conflicting qualities are evident in the near life-size portrait Wolfe commissioned from Cabanel during a visit to Paris in 1875–76, when she was forty-seven years old (plate 7). Her forceful character is readily apparent in the determined set of her mouth, which a contemporary described as “undeniably indicative of firmness and strength of will.” Perhaps it was this air of assertiveness that led Shinn to claim that she embodied “one of our select American types” and “the national character of a period.”82 But another facet of Wolfe’s persona emerges in the sensuality of her fur-trimmed décolletage and the clinging fabric that traces the contour of her body. Cabanel captures a certain ripeness that belies her reputation as an erstwhile “maiden lady” and alludes instead to a more passionate nature. She engages the viewer with a direct stare, in a way that confirms American women’s emerging independence in the Gilded Age. Scholars concerned with the emergence of the female gaze in the nineteenth century acknowledge that the sexual politics of vision based on “male voyeurism” and passive female subjects changed as women began to look beyond the home and, empowered by consumption, move more freely around the metropolis. Although Beth Newman concurs with this historical analysis, she maintains that such an interpretation is constricted by its neglect of psychological desires that refuse to harmonize with material imperatives and cultural mores. Enlisting Freud’s notion of scopophilia, or “sexual pleasure in looking,” Newman argues that women had begun to enjoy being looked at and displaying themselves.83 This transformation raises the distinct possibility that the unmarried Wolfe viewed herself and wished to be viewed as an object of desire. Far from displeased with her portrait, Wolfe had a special alcove designed for it in the dining room of her home on Madison Square. Here she allowed herself to relish this and other sumptuously rendered paintings in private. Wolfe’s home communicated a mixture of psychosexual codes due to her taste for sensuous paintings resembling those of male collectors. Her choices are surprising, considering the narrow definition of privileged women’s proper behavior at this time. Shinn failed to comment on the explicitly sexual undertones in Wolfe’s painting collection and did not seem to find it strange that a woman would display erotic female figures in her home, even though he responded to them with some excitement. These figures included Charles Chaplin’s Haydee (1873), in which the subject is provocatively clothed in a diaphanous robe; Hughes Merle’s life-size Autumn,

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

65

20. Alexandre Cabanel, The Shulamite, 1876, oil on canvas. From Earl Shinn, The Art Treasures of America (Philadelphia: Gebbie and Barrie, 1879–82), 1:120.

featuring a full-length scantily clad female figure; and Cabanel’s bare-breasted Shulamite (fig. 20), which matched the size of Wolfe’s portrait by the same artist.84 The warm red and burnished gold in Cabanel’s composition emphasize the startlingly white flesh of the woman, who is described in the Old Testament as enchanting King Solomon. Shinn allowed himself to be carried to rapturous heights in his description of the painting: The gauzes fall from her bosom, and the rose-petal nudity of the feet, the supple exposure of the arms, tells of the warm ennui of sun-baked lands. . . . here is a voluntary softness of touch that seems unsexed; a melting of human flesh into glutinous deliquescence, unbraced by bone, and, in the conception itself, a boudoir elegance. (1:120)

In spite of its “boudoir elegance,” Shinn informs us that Wolfe displayed this canvas on the main wall of her drawing room. Nowhere does he suggest that it might be indecorous for an unmarried woman to exhibit such a voluptuous image so prominently. John Ruskin, on the other hand, just twenty years earlier, advised an English spinster that it was inappropriate for her to buy an image of a couple kissing.85 That New Yorkers were apparently more adventurous is evidenced by the second spinster whom Shinn visited in that city, Sarah Hitchcock, whose small collection included Jean-Jacques Henner’s painting of a bare-breasted Magdalen.86 Because Shinn saw fit to reproduce illustrations of these partially nude figures from Wolfe’s and Hitchcock’s collections, it would seem that he found nothing untoward about their choices. He presumably viewed these sensuously rendered biblical figures in the same purportedly idealistic category as William Corcoran’s nude satyrs, which he excused in the name of classical mythology (1:9). Shinn’s liberal attitude was not universally shared, however: auctions that contained nude paintings frequently held “gentlemen only” previews, and one female collector discouraged her husband from buying such subjects, “lest the anti-nudists should declare a revolution.”87 Although some of the “New Women” of the next generation were to view unfettered female sexuality as an emblem of emancipation, that liberating moment had not yet arrived. Shinn’s attempt to diminish the eroticism of The Shulamite by arguing for its “unsexed” representation stretches the limits of credulity. As Anne Higonnet asks, “How could a nude, which by definition represented the active projection of desire onto a sexual object, be represented as the denial of that active desire?”88 In Wolfe’s case, like Mary Telfair’s, lack of evidence makes it impossible to determine if the erotic appeal of the paintings she lived with stemmed from same-sex or heterosexual desire. Carroll SmithRosenberg speculates that Victorian women’s sexuality may have been less repressed than is assumed, and because sexual impulses are part of a continuum bracketed by heterosexuality and homosexuality, with a vast range of sexual feelings in between, it is di‹cult to locate a historic subject along this spectrum.89 There is no denying, however, that Wolfe, like Morgan, staged her possessions to assist in her escapist fantasies. Completed too late to gain entry into Shinn’s Art Treasures of America, the fanciful retreat that Wolfe commissioned the architectural firm Peabody and Stearns to build for

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

67

21. Peabody and Stearns (architects), Vinland, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe residence, Newport, Rhode Island, 1884. From George Sheldon, Artistic Country-Seats (1886–87; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), 2:185.

her in Newport in 1883 was an even more organic blending of architecture, decoration, and self-expressive personal space.90 A rich woman’s fantasy, Vinland (fig. 21) was designed to recall Newport’s allegedly mythic Viking origins and provided Wolfe with an escape from her rigid New York schedule. Shinn no doubt would have been disappointed in Wolfe’s choice of an Arts and Crafts décor, having commended her for avoiding “the stu‹ness of modern British household decoration” in her New York home (1:119). Even more disappointing to him, no doubt, was the rapidity with which this decorative craze reached the United States. The masculine Arts and Crafts style was conflated with the Aesthetic movement’s more graceful lines when it arrived on American shores in the 1880s. Wealthy women like Wolfe diluted it further by ignoring its socialist underpinnings and adding their own personal touches. Scholars of this phenomenon contend that it empowered females because it invited their collaboration with artists. Although it was considered a women’s movement because the “fair sex” was targeted by design schools, art educators, and commercial venders, its leading sponsors were nonetheless men. These pundits included Whistler, Oscar Wilde, and William Morris in England and Charles Comfort Tiªany and Samuel Colman in the United States. Ironically, they did little more than capitalize on a thriving women’s

68

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

cottage industry and mark it with the stamp of professionalism, which made it more acceptable for male collectors to acquire the decorative arts. Even so, female collectors were vindicated when the principle of integrating art into everyday life, cherished by women for decades, was finally upgraded to an aesthetic philosophy.91 Female designers and critics did not squander this recognition of women’s longstanding eªorts. Candace Wheeler placed her talents at the service of Tiªany and Colman’s Associated Artists design firm, while Mariana van Rensselaer promulgated Aestheticism in a series of books and articles on architecture, interiors, and gardens. It was with relief rather than bitterness that she registered the belated regard for the decorative arts and their viability as an alternative form of collecting in an essay she contributed to Wheeler’s treatise Household Art in 1893: We are learning that all art is one, that no sharp line can be drawn between what is decorative and what is not, and that things which are less than “artistic” cannot be properly “eªective in decoration.” We are learning that we may show our love for art otherwise than by “collecting,” and may create our homes in better ways than by turning them into museums.92

Contrary to Shinn’s separatist philosophy, which held the fine arts in private picture galleries above the decorative items distributed throughout the home, van Rensselaer’s endorsement of organic harmony legitimated women’s intricately blended interiors. Endowed with deep pockets, Catharine Wolfe could aªord to commission William Morris to design stained glass, carpets, wallpapers, slipcovers, and other fabrics for her interior at Vinland. Apparently pleased with the opportunity to make use of his research into Norse literature, Morris also provided inscriptions for the figures of legendary Vikings that Edward Burne-Jones designed for the stained-glass windows. The Viking Ship (fig. 22) captures the mythic mood of the art program, which was continued in Walter Crane’s ninety-six-foot frieze in the dining room. The frieze illustrates Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s poem “A Skeleton in Armor,” which describes the ill-fated romance between a Scandinavian knight and a princess. Wolfe exercised a controlling hand over the project: she sent Crane a photograph of the ruined tower on Newport’s beach, which many residents believed was evidence of a Viking settlement, and insisted that he include it in his composition.93 She also embellished the contributions of this British team of designers with more international objects. Wolfe creatively orchestrated the exotic mood of Vinland’s interiors by sending scouts as far away as Russia to obtain camel saddlebags, carpets, and silk fabrics for portieres and draperies, along with turquoise belts to loop around them. Descriptions of the house’s overall eªect suggest the almost palpable density of an interior space designed to stimulate the imagination and cater to its owner’s psychic needs.94 The resulting fairytale cottage by the sea stood as a monument to the longing and fantasy of a woman for whom money was no object. While Morris may have enjoyed putting his study of the Icelandic sagas to practical use, he was more ambivalent about accepting a commission from a rich

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

69

22. Edward Burne-Jones for William Morris and Company, The Viking Ship, 1884, stained-glass window for Vinland, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware.

woman who magnanimously told him to name his own price. He vented his frustrations in a note he penned in Burne-Jones’s account book: “Price not originally fixed, but left to a shifting principle termed honour—this combined with sudden outburst of social views on subject of property has made of this contact something I would sooner not dwell more upon now. After a scene of great pain to me price fixed at £25 each £150.”95 Morris would perhaps have been less disquieted by his millionaire client had he known that the responsibilities of her wealth weighed heavily on her and that she dedicated herself to helping the poor to a much greater extent than the vast majority of men and women in her class. In fact, Wolfe was held up as a model to be imitated in a widely published sermon delivered in her memory following her death in 1887, titled “The Religious Use of Wealth.”96 Yet it seems that she experienced occasional twinges of conscience over her sumptuous houses and looked for ways to justify her lavish lifestyle. An article clipping pasted into her personal scrapbook argues that the earthly home should attempt to mirror its heavenly counterpart, pronouncing: “If there is any form of extravagance that is pardonable, it is that which manifests itself in the beautifying of the home.” An expression of the “morality of individual fulfillment” that characterizes the shift from Puritan self-denial to modern self-gratification, its message must have reassured Wolfe.97 Every time she leafed through her scrapbook, she could take comfort in knowing that the rooms that brought her so much pleasure served a higher purpose as well. Despite the self-dis-

70

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

cipline and concern for others that Wolfe demonstrated in public, she apparently still needed a justification for the personal satisfaction she found in her luxurious rooms. The novelists who wrote about the social life of this period understood this symbiosis between women and their home environments. Henry James, in The Spoils of Poynton, describes Adela Gareth’s collection of art objects, cabinets, and tables as an extension of her being, containing “an element of creation, of personality”; the prospect of losing it is like an “amputation” to her. Sharing his brother William’s views on phenomenology, James recognized the process of projecting bodily feelings onto objects.98 Although Edith Wharton was to criticize the bric-a-brac style of decoration favored by the women of Wolfe’s generation in her Decoration of Houses (1897) and condescendingly referred to the Wolfe collection of paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as “anecdotic,” she revealed that she fully concurred with the notion that rooms filled with personal possessions were expressive spaces that communicated women’s deepest feelings when she observed: “A woman’s nature is like a great house full of rooms.”99 Throughout her writing, Wharton relies on houses as metaphors for women’s lives, from The House of Mirth, where she traces Lily Bart’s social decline through a series of interior spaces, to The Age of Innocence, where she conveys Ellen Olenska’s longing for freedom and security through the symbol of the house. Referring to this material and metaphysical connection, Wharton confided to her friend Mary Berenson her belief that one must “decorate one’s inner house so richly that one is content there.”100 Wharton practiced what she preached: she designed several houses for herself containing rooms that she furnished in a manner that allowed her imagination to flow. “Flow,” according to a psychological study of the relation between domestic objects and their owners, is “a kind of integrated attention that serves to direct a person’s psychic energy toward realizing his or her goals.”101 In Wharton’s case, it describes the process of writing, but it was also present in the lives of nonprofessional women collectors who were fueled by the psychic energy they allocated to certain objects in which they invested feelings, memories, and associations. The self-reflexivity induced by collections like Morgan’s and Wolfe’s is a modern trait that became apparent in America’s decades of prosperity following the Civil War, when the climate of self-sacrifice metamorphosed into one encouraging self-fulfillment. The impact of commodity culture on human subjectivity was not entirely solipsistic, however: advice manuals began to stress that self-improvement should be acquired along with luxuries. This confluence of material culture and character encouraged women to invest goods with meaning. A host of recent studies on the subject of women and consumption maintain that acquisition, rather than making women pawns of capitalism, empowered them by fostering a spirit of self-determination in their quest for possessive individualism.102 Ownership of the self was a necessary step in the American woman’s campaign for full citizenship. Women who demonstrated too great an interest in monetary matters, however, were rebuked. While it was acceptable for male collectors to exhibit the unquenchable self-

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

71

interest that fueled the market economy, women were expected to adhere to the domestic virtues and demonstrate more restraint. The servility that Thorstein Veblen characterized as “one of the chief ornaments of the well-bred” woman was not a quality that could be ascribed to Marietta Reed Stevens, whose collection Shinn briefly reviewed (3:113–15).103 Collecting, to this financially savvy widow, was a way to announce her ownership of both economic and cultural capital. Stevens’s fixation on money was in one sense liberating, in that it made her more competent at handling her aªairs than most widows, but it also laid her open to criticism. Much as it did Eliza Jumel, controversy followed Stevens throughout her life. The taint of trade associated with her greengrocer father and hotelier husband, Paran Stevens; the brazenness of her invasion of the male world of finance; and her role in breaking oª the engagement of her son Harry to the future Edith Wharton continued to prompt criticism even after her death. As a consequence, Stevens’s contentious reputation has overshadowed the strides she made in becoming the agent of her own carefully crafted identity. After her husband’s death in 1872, Stevens concentrated on augmenting her position in society by lavishly furnishing her home and orchestrating socially desirable marriages for her two children. Stevens was delighted with her daughter Minnie’s marriage to Lord Arthur Paget, a grandson of the Marquess of Anglesey, but she appeared to have second thoughts about her son Harry’s relationship with the young Edith Jones, even though she came from one of New York’s well-established families. Wharton’s biographers speculate that the reason for the dissolution of her engagement in 1881 was because Marietta Stevens wanted to remain in control of her son’s trust fund for a further two years, until he reached the age of twenty-five.104 Her income alone was insu‹cient to support her houses in New York and Newport and winters on the French Riviera. Indeed, Stevens supplemented her income by accepting favors from the people she helped to launch in society. When Louise Hungerford Mackay, whose home Shinn visited in San Francisco, was snubbed by old New York, despite the millions her husband had reaped from the Comstock mines in Nevada, Stevens oªered to become her sponsor in exchange for advice on investments, telling her: “I’m a businesswoman. I look after my own aªairs. I’ve had to since my husband died. . . . All I want is John Mackay’s advice on mining stocks.”105 By aggressively entering into the male economic sphere and even launching lawsuits of her own, Stevens risked violating the Victorian code of public conduct, which dictated that women act as “ladies” outside the home. Her obituary in the New York Times pointedly commented on her unusual dedication to commerce: “It was her custom to begin business at the breakfast table and keep at it until she went to dinner. She kept a private secretary busy all day long.” For her boldness in sailing out into these uncharted waters, Stevens was described in another newspaper article as having “a man’s mind.”106 The fact that she did not bother to disguise either her gendered enthusiasm for financial matters or her social ambitions invited criticism even by her own sex. Wharton, who admittedly had her own reasons for disliking Stevens, satirized her in The Age of Innocence as the manipulative Mrs. Manson Mingott, who, like Stevens, is famous for her musical evenings and infamous for arrang-

72

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

ing marriages between her children and European aristocrats and trying to control her late husband’s fortune. Stevens had the last word, however: in 1891, four years before her death, she bought the marble mansion of Mary Mason Jones, Wharton’s aunt, on upper Fifth Avenue, which had been the setting for The Age of Innocence.107 Appearance was crucial to Stevens’s social enterprises, and she did not stint on the décor of her new home. However, due to her desire to impress, it was less intimately conceived than Morgan’s or Wolfe’s. Shinn made no reference to the hominess of this residence, nor, true to form, did he deign to mention her large collection of miniatures and paintings on silk. The existence of these artworks was recorded in the journal The Collector, which, unlike The Art Treasures of America, encouraged the acquisition of decorative arts: Mrs. Paran Stevens, during her wanderings through Europe, has collected no less than a hundred miniatures, painted on ivory, onyx and silver, each the beauty of some well-known family, disposed of by some improvident member. . . . Another weakness of Mrs. Stevens is a collection of pictures done in silk by the dames of high degree in the past, during their quiet little afternoon teas at the Court of Maria Theresa, while some jeu de mot was going the round.108

Similarly to Eliza Jumel and Elizabeth Hart Jarvis Colt, Stevens was in thrall to the aristocracy, and her aspirations to identify with them drove her taste in the decorative arts. Like the ambitious mothers who sought marriages for their children to titled Europeans, described by Maureen Montgomery in “Gilded Prostitution”: Status, Money, and Transatlantic Marriages, Stevens aimed to improve her family’s social status.109 While this assessment seems to reinforce Stevens’s reputation as a purveyor of the superficial, it would be wrong to underestimate either her taste or her character. Shinn found much to praise in her collection, particularly the paintings she owned by Millet, Constant Troyon, and Rosa Bonheur. Likewise, many people admired Stevens herself, including the well-bred Catharine Wolfe, who expressed her sympathy at the time of Harry Stevens’s premature death from tuberculosis at the age of twenty-five.110 While Wolfe might appear to be Stevens’s antithesis, they shared a number of traits in common. Both recognized the importance of collecting in fulfilling their fantasies. Both refused to conform to the Gilded Era’s normative definition of femininity. And both were shrewd businesswomen who stretched the boundaries of their gender by engaging in finance. But while Wolfe’s circumspect routine and charitable donations shielded her from censure, Stevens’s more flamboyant lifestyle and precarious finances left her vulnerable to criticism. The same could not be said about the widowed Anna Breck Aspinwall, whose New York collection Shinn reviewed in The Art Treasures of America (3:123–24). She conformed to Victorian standards of womanhood during and after her marriage to William Henry Aspinwall, a railroad and shipping magnate. No doubt it was his role as a founder of the

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

73

Metropolitan Museum of Art that led Shinn to conclude that William was solely responsible for the family’s art collection, but Anna in fact took an active part in its formation. On their trips to Europe, she shopped for furniture, rugs, and silver, while her husband acquired paintings from titled private collectors and contemporary artists. However, their decorative arts were excluded from the two galleries in their home on College Place in New York, which they opened to the public one day a week (fig. 23). Here one detects William Aspinwall’s hand in the segregation of old masters and contemporary painters and in the systematic grouping of canvases. His biographer was more willing to allow Anna Aspinwall an active role in the selection of paintings for Rockwood, the second home they built in Tarrytown in 1860, which was later sold to John Rockefeller Sr. There they apparently “planned the decorating and furnishing of their new summer home, selecting paintings and drapes and furniture, deciding on the colors for repainting much of the interior . . . with shared enthusiasm.”111 Anna Aspinwall’s participation in the choice of paintings is significant, but so is this evidence of mutual collaboration between wife and husband. Many couples enjoyed a kind of intersubjectivity centered on art collecting that brought them shared pleasure. Jessica Benjamin adds another layer to the psychoanalytic theory of individuation when she proposes that the self can evolve through the mutual recognition of similar feelings and intentions in another person, which she describes as “the simultaneous desire for loss of self and for wholeness (or oneness) with the Other” in a close relationship.112 In some instances, the outward expression of this intimacy among married art enthusiasts took the form of grown-ups playing house together; in others, the joint passion for art collecting was more closely akin to sexual foreplay when they eroticized and fetishized art objects. As out of character as it may seem, Queen Victoria indulged in collecting-as-foreplay. She delighted in giving Prince Albert paintings of female nudes for their private quarters at Osborne House, which the two of them had taken great care in furnishing to their personal specifications. For this privileged pair, as well as for more bourgeois and same-sex couples, the fulfillment of desire should be considered a compelling motivation for collecting.113 The decorative arts also began to take on a more profound meaning in individual men’s lives as the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements infiltrated America. Gilded Age dealers who marketed objets d’art to women discovered, much to their delight, a growing number of males among their clients. While some were primarily attracted to the investment value of bibelots, others, such as William Walters of Baltimore, were influenced by the aristocratic gloss that elegantly appointed items lent to interiors. At the other end of the spectrum, still other male collectors preferred the increasingly popular and more democratic handcrafted products of the Arts and Crafts movement. Although the adornment of the home traditionally fell under the American woman’s purview, more and more men came to appreciate the restorative powers of feminine interior space. Jacob von Falke noted this trend in his chapter on women’s aesthetic mission in Art in the House (1879):

74

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

23. Modern and old master picture galleries, William Henry and Anna Breck Aspinwall residence, New York, illustrated in Harper’s Weekly, February 26, 1859, 133. Photo: HarpWeek LLC.

The husband’s occupations necessitate his absence from the house, and call him far away from it. During the day his mind is absorbed in many good and useful ways, in making and acquiring money for instance, and even after the hours of business have passed, they occupy his thoughts. When he returns home tired with work and in need of recreation, he longs for quiet enjoyment and takes pleasure in the home which his wife has made comfortable and attractive. . . . She is mistress of the house in which she rules, and which she orders like a queen. Should it not then be specially her business to add beauty to the order which she has created?114

Women’s secret knowledge of the beneficial eªects of well-chosen objects, in other words, was unveiled and called into play. Women were charged with sharing their wisdom by designing rooms for their partners to escape the pressures of daily life. If, as I have suggested, women had long been aware of the soothing properties of objects, it was not their aesthetic mission that required attention, but men’s psychological needs. The diagnosis of mental anxiety had become so pronounced in American society in the rush to progress following the Civil War that the Philadelphia neurologist George Miller Beard published a series of remedies in A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (1869). Urban slums, brutal crime, waves of immigrants, tension between labor and capital, and fierce competition frayed the nerves of city dwellers. Dr. Beard blamed urban life and its problems for the neurasthenic condition of male “brain-workers” who were overstimulated by the demands of their occupations.115 Beard could have been describing Charles Lang Freer, who, after making a fortune building railroad cars in Detroit, suªered a nervous collapse in 1898 and spent a recuperative year communing with his collection of Asian objets d’art and tranquil paintings by Whistler, Dewing, and Dwight William Tryon. A bachelor, Freer designed a contemplative interior for himself, where he adopted the female practice of transforming “an ordinary living space into a therapeutic psychic space.” There, according to Kathleen Pyne, he partook of “a rich fantasy life in which he found consolation in projecting himself into the imagined past lives of his objects.”116 Freer appeared pallid and apprehensive, however, when photographed by Edward Steichen sometime in 1915 or 1916 (fig. 24). Plumped up by embroidered pillows and covered with a lap rug, he is posed against the graceful backdrop of an ornate screen with all of the accouterments of the curative female interior, yet he clutches the Asian vessel in his hand with sti›y contorted, tense fingers. As Susan Stewart reasons, it is not art that generates release, but the interior of the self.117 Art, to men like Freer, held out the hope of mental and spiritual renewal, but it could not solve all of their worldly problems. Women, as I argue throughout this book, initially began to embellish their private spaces as a way of coping with being relegated to the domestic sphere, but came to realize that aesthetic objects were more than temporary tonics and that in addition to helping them resolve their inner anxieties, induced them to focus outward and seek greater freedom outside the home. Freer and the men von Falke describes in Art in the House, on the other

76

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

24. Edward Steichen, Charles Lang Freer, c. 1915–16, platinum print, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Reprinted with permission of Joanna T. Steichen.

hand, followed a reverse trajectory when they retreated from the mundane world into the home. That is not to say that this process was rigidly gendered. Despite claims that Gilded Age tycoons had a “predatory notion of culture,” their motivations in collecting were multifaceted, ranging from ostentatious pride in possessions to a search for a substitute for dislocated spiritual values to an outlet for unfulfilled desires.118 Women’s motives, too, were aªected by the weighty responsibilities that accompanied the independence so many dreamed of winning. Catharine Wolfe, for instance, created her Xanadu in Newport only after demands on her time and money had become incessant. The majority of women, though, experienced years of cloistering with few alternatives available to them, unlike Gilded Age men, who were free to engage or disengage themselves in the spaces of the home. The example of Freer points to another diªerence between the experiences of men and women during this period: while Freer struggled to regain his mental stability during his recovery, no one attempted to take over his financial aªairs. This was not the case

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

77

with the two remaining widows in Shinn’s survey of New York collections. Both Abigail Wheatley Blodgett and Cornelia Clinch Stewart were abused by advisers who contrived to usurp their inheritances on the grounds that women were too irrational to control their spending and thus were incapable of managing large sums of money. “Consumption,” according to Jackson Lears, “became an arena of gender conflict and evoked the fear that, without proper boundaries, the market could undermine self-control . . . [and] lead to madness.”119 This thinking played into larger fears about the laissez-faire structure of capitalist economics, which encouraged rampant individualism at the expense of the civic virtue that was a founding principle of the American republic. Although successful businessmen-collectors like William Blodgett and Alexander Turney Stewart were admired for maintaining a balance between self-gratification and fiscal restraint, their widows were deemed incapable of conforming to this male ideal. Shinn gave Abigail Blodgett short shrift in his survey, referring to her simply as William Blodgett’s widow rather than by her own name (1:123). At the time of his visit, she possessed only a few remaining items from the extensive collection that had been dispersed after her husband’s death in 1875 by order of his executors. Although Shinn credited William Blodgett with the formation of the family collection of old masters and European and American modern art, Abigail was recognized by other sources as a “woman of infinite taste who . . . exercised a happy influence on the artistic passions of her husband.”120 Her dedication to the arts spanned several decades, from her membership on the Fine Arts Committee of the Metropolitan Fair in 1864 to her loan of several paintings to an exhibition at the National Academy of Design in 1893, continuing into the twentieth century when she commissioned Peabody and Stearns to build a cottage for her in Northeast Harbor, Maine in 1901.121 Abigail Blodgett’s matronage of the arts abruptly ended two years later when her son, William T. Blodgett, decided that she was incompetent to manage her estate and initiated proceedings to be appointed her conservator. As evidence for his claim, the younger Blodgett cited Abigail’s purchases of rare books, proclaiming that she had paid $130,000 for a set of Dickens and $78,000 for three sets of Shakespeare.122 Books were not simply a whimsical expenditure on Abigail Blodgett’s part: reading was a mainstay of her life. Eastman Johnson memorialized her habit in his 1864 group portrait Christmas Time: The Blodgett Family (fig. 25), where he represents the thirty-six-year-old wife and mother marking her place in the book she has been momentarily distracted from reading by the antics of her two daughters and the son who was later to encumber her inheritance. Although her daughters, Eleanor and Mary Elizabeth, are visually aligned in a triangular relationship to her, her son’s booted feet are poised for action on the same plane as his father. Young William would later prove that he was worthy of the patriarchal gaze that his father admiringly directs at him by going to court to protect his father’s fortune from his mother, while Eleanor would try to rectify this wrong by giving $10,000 in her mother’s memory to support the fledgling CooperHewitt’s collection of decorative arts.123

78

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

25. Eastman Johnson, Christmas Time: The Blodgett Family, 1864, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Whitney Blodgett, 1983 (1983.486). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

In Johnson’s domestic scene, gender is a veiled signifier for matrimony in the service of patrimony. I am using these terms in their literal sense, as two deceptively companionable nouns with dissimilar definitions—matrimony meaning wedlock, marriage, and conjugality, and patrimony meaning inheritance, estate, and lineage. Even though Abigail Blodgett was legally entitled to spend the assets she brought into her marriage due to the passage of a series of Married Women’s Acts in New York State between 1848 and 1862 and was her husband’s designated heir, the court invalidated her independence when it supported her son’s claim to his patrimony by appointing him her conservator. Such appellate decisions perpetuated the dominance of husbands, fathers, and sons over wives, mothers, and daughters.124 Cornelia Stewart had also suªered the ignominy of having a large part of her inheritance taken away from her by a trusted ally at the time Shinn paid her a visit. Although her husband, Alexander Turney Stewart, left her his entire estate, he appointed his friend, Judge Henry Hilton, co-executor. Ironically, the department store magnate had made his fortune by catering to women’s irrational desires and encouraging them to disregard the Puritan ethic of self-denial by indulging themselves. Did he believe his wife incapable of resisting the same kinds of temptation? Or did Stewart share the young William Blodgett’s view that women needed “rational” supervision? Trusting her husband’s judgment, Cornelia Stewart transferred virtually all of her business interests to Judge Hilton for $1 million, not realizing that her assets were valued at closer to $40 million.125 Hilton then ignored instructions in Alexander Stewart’s will to liquidate the business and drove it into receivership within six years. Although Cornelia Stewart was not responsible for this debacle, in the postbellum “age of excess” that was so preoccupied by wealth, she was expected to carry on a legacy of profitability, not loss, and was consequently deemed inept. Cornelia Stewart’s reputation took on a more ghoulish cast when her husband’s co‹n was stolen for ransom in 1878. While there is no proof to support the rumor that she negotiated with the thieves and paid $20,000 to have the corpse returned, the incident has contributed to the myth of madness that surrounds her name. She has been called “a silly, good-natured creature, poor in intellectual resources and desperately lonely” who, “wearing a brown wig and laden with jewels, flitted aimlessly among the marble statues” in her mansion.126 This bizarre characterization reveals more about the cliché of the rich, lonely widow than it does about Stewart’s mental state: records prove that she kept her wits about her. Rather than confining herself to her home following her husband’s death, Stewart extended her spatial parameters to the public world of philanthropy and art collecting. She commissioned the Cathedral of the Incarnation in Garden City, a model town that Alexander Stewart had built for people of “modest means,” where she additionally funded a girls’ school and a theological seminary. She also brought to fruition the Working Women’s Hotel, which her husband had conceived “as a woman’s kingdom, where those of them that wish to be alone can be so.”127 Grateful to his wife for aiding his ascent up the financial

80

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

ladder through her family’s business contacts, and appreciative of the dedicated female employees of his department store, Alexander Stewart acknowledged his debt when he decided to create a place where professional women could live safely and independently in five hundred well-appointed rooms. Enthused about the project, Cornelia Stewart furnished the interior from her personal collection of paintings, Asian vases, and Turkish rugs. But the widow and her co-executor clashed once again when Hilton undermined the project by admitting men and unilaterally stating that women were primarily interested in marriage and therefore should not live apart from men. Cornelia Stewart had more control over the enormous art collection she inherited after her husband’s death. Her own collection of laces and jewelry has been eclipsed by Alexander Stewart’s commissions to French artists such as Meissonier, Bouguereau, and Gérôme.128 Shinn considered the painting collection “the principal private one in the country”—one that clearly illustrated his claim that America possessed “great modern art” by Europe’s leading painters.129 Though the collection has traditionally been attributed to Alexander Stewart, it is likely that Cornelia was also involved in its selection, since she accompanied her husband to art exhibitions and buying trips to Europe, and continued to acquire canvases after his death. Shinn, in fact, noted that it was Cornelia and not Alexander who had purchased Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant’s On the Terrace in 1879 (2:94).130 The fifty-five-room marble mansion at Fifth Avenue and Thirty-fourth Street into which the Stewarts moved in 1869 has also mistakenly been considered entirely her husband’s achievement, perhaps because its imposing façade has the proportions of a palace suited to the ambitions of New York’s most successful merchant prince. The decorative scheme of the interior, however, was decidedly feminine.131 In the drawing room (fig. 26), both walls and ceiling were painted with floral festoons in lacy patterns that were echoed in the carpet and complemented the collection of rare laces that Cornelia Stewart took great pride in showing her visitors. This resonance, as we have seen, is characteristic of female décor. Instead of separating her favorite designs in a special room, as did her husband in his celebrated gallery, Cornelia Stewart integrated the motifs she admired into the structure of her home, creating a unified ensemble. Extending the full seventy-five-foot length of the house, the picture gallery (fig. 27), in contrast, resembled the o‹cial French salons where Alexander Stewart acquired most of his paintings. Even Shinn found the gallery to have “a rather crushed appearance” (1:123). Stacked liked the merchandise in Stewart’s commercial emporium, the “fine arts” were displayed on pedestals and in methodical, mathematically precise groupings on crowded walls, in marked contrast to the more intimately arranged decorative arts in the drawing room. It should not be surprising to detect Cornelia Stewart’s hand at work in the home. Given that Alexander Stewart is considered “the pioneer in the business of gender diªerentiation” for his founding role in creating a welcoming public space in which women were invited to shop and socialize, it is only fitting that he would encourage his wife to express

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

81

26–27. Drawing room and picture gallery, Alexander and Cornelia Stewart residence, New York, c. 1883. From Artistic Houses (New York: Appleton, 1883–84), part 1, facing pp. 14, 15, respectively.

herself.132 After all, his marketing plan enticed women out of their homes and promised to send them back transformed, after fulfilling their desires. In his studies of department stores, William Leach considers the liberating impact they had on women consumers at a transformative moment in American history. He concludes that this experience “challenged and subverted that complex of qualities traditionally known as feminine—dependence, passivity, religious piety, domestic inwardness, sexual purity, and maternal nurture.” As a result, women won “a new definition of gender that carved out a space for individual expression similar to men’s.”133 Empowered, women were encouraged to become producers as well as consumers of culture. They returned from their shopping expeditions and expressed themselves as artists of the interior, using walls as their canvases and decorative items as their brushstrokes. Once Shinn managed to tear himself away from New York’s opulent galleries, he continued to review collections owned by widows in Philadelphia. Not only did married women remain invisible to him, but he ignored their highly visible presence at the Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition in 1876. He also ignored the prominence the exhibition gave to the decorative arts, in keeping with his self-defined task of illustrating the advanced taste evident in American collections of the fine arts. Due to Shinn’s determination to make a case for the aesthetic acuity of businessmen in his native Philadelphia to promote his overarching thesis of America’s cultural advancement, he was more interested in the male members of the households he visited than in the overall eªect created by the arrangement of their wives’ décors. The women whose collections he reviewed there had all been married to members of Philadelphia’s business elite, the critic’s primary interest. Elizabeth McKean Borie’s husband, Adolph, had been a silk and tea trader who had branched out into financial and railroad enterprises, while Amanda Ruckman Fell was the widow of Joseph Gillingham Fell, a civil engineer who had gone on to become president of the Lehigh Valley Railroad. Also involved in railways, Sarah Poulterer Harrison’s husband, Joseph, had designed locomotives and had been invited to Russia in 1843 to build engines for 2,500 freight cars. The fortune that Anna Wilstach’s deceased husband, William, had made selling saddlery hardware had allowed him to retire in 1858 at the age of forty-eight. There is no trace today of the occupation of the husband of Mrs. Russell Sturges, whose collection Shinn breezed over, mentioning only one painting.134 Considering Shinn’s selection criteria, it is likely that she, too, had been married to a representative of the new business aristocracy that had replaced the merchant statesmen of Philadelphia after the Civil War. E. Digby Baltzell, in his study of the class structure of Philadelphia, notes “Veblen’s gentleman of leisure is noticeably absent in Philadelphia.”135 Shinn was fiercely proud of the mercantile associations of Philadelphia’s art patrons. He boasted: It is the great manufacturing community which now-a-days is the chief friend of Art. . . . That ideal sense which a mediaeval knight would have satisfied by building a chapel, and the Roman consul by maintaining a poet, our merchants of Manchester and Philadelphia

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

83

gratify by buying dear pictures. It is, then only what one expects when the latter city, the emporium of enormous industries, turns out to be the shelter for whatever is fine, strange, and beyond the common market; and some of the most intellectual pleasures which are in store for the explorer of modern art treasures will greet him in the industrial metropolis of Philadelphia, in the collections of men of business. (2:83–86)

Shinn not only sanctioned the right of privileged members of society to support the arts, but in expressing his undisguised admiration for the English merchants and manufacturers of Manchester, he provided an egalitarian provenance for Philadelphia’s captains of industry. Manchester’s businessmen enlisted their collections of modern art to define and assert their identity as hardworking members of the middle class, in distinction to the leisured aristocracy.136 Shinn, though, avoided pointing out a significant diªerence between Philadelphians and Mancunians: Englishwomen had no public role in the organization of the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition in 1857 or in the founding of the City Art Gallery in 1883, whereas American women were actively involved in the Philadelphia Centennial International Exhibition of 1876 and in supporting the city’s nascent art institutions. How could Shinn neglect the prominent part women played in the Centennial Exhibition? Was this not a similar example of the enlightened patronage he extolled in his paean to Philadelphia’s men of taste? It was not as if Shinn were uninformed: he wrote about the event in the Nation and was commissioned by Gebbie and Barrie, publisher of The Art Treasures of America, to survey the art displayed there in an illustrated volume, The Masterpieces of the Centennial International Exhibition (1876–78). One can only conclude that to Shinn the wealth of fine art on display demonstrated America’s growing cultural prominence as a nation, which made women’s involvement and their displays of decorative art pale by comparison. In the history of feminism, however, the Philadelphia Centennial celebration was a momentous event. It provided a forum for women’s concerns and challenged the pre–Civil War cult of domesticity by demonstrating how women’s creativity in the decorative arts could be more than a pleasant pastime if it was channeled into paid work. To this end, the women of Philadelphia raised $93,000 for a section of their own in Memorial Hall, the main exhibition building. But less than a year before the exhibition was due to open, they were curtly informed that “in the struggle for space, the portion allotted to women’s work . . . will be curtailed to a smaller compass.”137 Rather than succumb to this male prerogative, Philadelphia women resolved to create a clearly designated space for themselves and raised an additional $30,000 to build their own Woman’s Pavilion, featuring six hundred exhibits that showcased women’s progress in fields ranging from the fine and decorative arts to the medical and scientific arts. The exhibition in the Woman’s Pavilion invoked the ire of the National Woman Suªrage Association, however. Elizabeth Cady Stanton pilloried the display for ignoring items made in factories by women workers, such as textiles, shoes, and watches. Her primary criti-

84

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

cism, however, was that the Woman’s Pavilion had not included “framed copies of all the laws bearing injustly upon women—those which rob her of her name, her earnings, her property, her children, her person. . . . Women’s most fitting contributions would have been these protests, laws, and decisions, which show her political slavery.”138 Frustrated, Stanton took matters into her own hands and mobilized the National Woman Suªrage Association to stage a mass protest at the exposition on July 4, 1876, for which she, Susan B. Anthony, and Matilda Gage composed their famous Declaration of Rights for Women, modeled after the Declaration of Independence. A revised version of their Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments of 1848, it highlighted inequities in divorce statutes, state constitutions, and judicial codes.139 This historic moment stimulated women to action in the Philadelphia art world. The Centennial’s liberating influence is apparent in the decisions made by two of the widows Shinn included in his volume, Anna Wilstach and Sarah Harrison. Wilstach was charged by her husband in his will of 1870 to transfer their collection after her death to a purpose-built art gallery in Fairmont Park. She exercised her own judgment in carrying out his request, however, when she decided not to erect a new building, but to bequeath the collection she held in trust to Memorial Hall, by then the site of the Philadelphia Museum of Art, instead of to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. According to The Collector, she changed course because she was riled after “the o‹cials of the Academy once failed to treat her with proper deference.”140 One wonders if she chose Memorial Hall to express her solidarity with women, whose planned presence in the hall had been prevented during the Centennial. Wilstach ensured that the collection she intended for this space would not suªer a similar fate. Carefully shepherding her inheritance, she added an endowment of over $600,000 for the future care and expansion of the collection.141 Whereas her gift of 166 works of art was a custodial act of patronage, because her husband had been primarily responsible for selecting them, the monetary part of Wilstach’s bequest represented an independent act of matronage, since she had a hand in augmenting it. Sarah Harrison also demonstrated that she was infected by the spirit of civic involvement displayed by women at the Centennial Exhibition when she donated eleven paintings to the city of Philadelphia after her husband’s death in 1874, followed by a gift to the Smithsonian Institution of George Catlin’s paintings of Native Americans and a collection of Indian artifacts and costumes. In her will she bequeathed the remainder of her collection to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, but because there was not enough money in the estate to pay her heirs, fifty-six paintings were sold to fund the beneficiaries. Nonetheless, Harrison, like Wilstach, was inspired to pursue a higher level of public service by the example of women at the Centennial Exhibition.142 Amanda Fell and Elizabeth Borie, by contrast, did not follow this pattern of civic engagement. Although Fell’s husband donated works of art to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he served as a director for more than thirteen years, she chose instead to leave the American and French paintings in her possession to her daughters.143

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

85

Nor did Borie bequeath to the public the French paintings by Millet, Eugène Delacroix, Eugène Boudin, and Henri Fantin-Latour she inherited. Like Fell, she was essentially a custodian of the collection her husband had formed.144 Neither was actively engaged in the cultural or social activism that characterized the remaining women in Shinn’s survey. Boston supported one of the nation’s most vibrant communities of women, yet Shinn reviewed only one collection there belonging to a female, the recently deceased Alice Sturgis Hooper. She holds the distinction in the annals of American collecting of having made the first public gift to Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. The unmarried daughter of Congressman Samuel Hooper and Anne Sturgis, she purchased Washington Allston’s Elijah in the Desert in 1870, while in London with her mother, and immediately donated it to the new museum. Hooper described her enthusiasm to its founding director, Martin Brimmer: We only saw it once but that was in such very good company, that if we cared to look at it at all there could be no doubt of its being a really fine picture. It was exhibited last winter in the new Royal Academy rooms in London, in one of the finest collections from private galleries that has ever been made in that land of good pictures, and held its own among the fine works of the old masters in a manner most satisfactory to all lovers of Allston. Hearing soon after it was for sale, we thought that we couldn’t better testify our interest in this new art movement at home than by adding a really fine Allston to our public collection.145

Curiously, Shinn ignored this act of matronage, as well as Hooper’s subsequent donation of a painting by Frank Duveneck. He refers to only one painting in her collection, J.M.W. Turner’s The Slave Ship, which had found its way to America when the New York collector John Taylor Johnston purchased it from John Ruskin in 1872 through the agency of Abigail Blodgett’s husband, William. Alice Hooper, in turn, bought the painting at Johnston’s sale in 1876, three years before her death.146 As the sister of a Union soldier who was killed during the Civil War and the daughter of a legislator who proposed laws to protect fugitive slaves, Hooper must have found personal resonance in the abolitionist message of Turner’s painting. Hooper’s belief in the power of art to instruct and educate, which she expressed in articles she wrote for the Nation, earned her a reputation as a “socially concerned” woman.147 Hooper’s sentiments were widely shared by Boston’s female community. There were so many women’s organizations dedicated to cultural and social improvement in the city that it was known as “a mammoth woman’s club.”148 Many of these organizations redirected their focus after the Civil War from supporting the antislavery campaign to crusading for women’s suªrage. This is the trajectory followed by Henry James’s fictional Mrs. Birdseye in The Bostonians. According to the author’s brother William, Mrs. Birdseye was based on the real-life social and art activist Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who taught drawing, published art instruction manuals, and ran an art school in Boston.149 It is likely that Peabody, a friend of Washington Allston’s, moved in the same circles as Alice Hooper.

86

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

Pauline Agassiz Shaw was committed to a similar roster of causes. Among her accomplishments was the establishment of sixteen free kindergartens in Boston, all of which employed the Froebel method of instruction, introduced to the city by Peabody. Shinn, however, focused his attention on Shaw’s husband, Quincy Adams Shaw, who, in his opinion, “simply has the finest collection extant of works by J. F. Millet” (3:85–86). Twentyone of these works by Millet were hung in the schoolroom of the Shaws’ home at the behest of Pauline, who clearly recognized the pedagogical use value inherent in Millet’s images of humble laborers. As the stepdaughter of Elizabeth Cary Agassiz, the first president of Radcliªe College, Shaw was privy to the educational journals that sang Millet’s praises and recommended using his art to teach the dignity of work. Shaw enormously impressed the French litterateur Theresa Blanc when she toured America in the early 1890s to research her book The Condition of Woman in the United States: A Traveller’s Notes (1895). She equated Shaw’s innovative kindergarten curriculum to “a truly national spirit of independence and enterprise.”150 Typical of Boston’s socially conscious women, Shaw was also concerned about the future possibilities of her sex. She founded the Boston Equal Suªrage Association for Good Government, which advocated that women should perceive the right to vote as an opportunity for civic service as well as a personal victory.151 Blanc was amazed by the level of commitment of Boston women, for whom “no aªair of city or state is foreign to them; they labor untiringly at the wheel of progress” (140). This focus would become more pronounced during the Progressive Era, when women collectors would agitate for a more powerful place in the polity. Shinn overlooked another Bostonian in his survey, Susan Clarke Warren, who contributed to the fledgling Museum of Fine Arts by donating Millet’s The Shepherdess in 1877. Typical of women of her era, she first began collecting furniture, china, lacquerware, and glass for her home. Inspired by a visit to the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia, she added more exotic objects from Japan and the Middle East to her collection. Warren eventually owned over five hundred items of decorative and fine art, which she mingled together in her home like her contemporary and sometime rival, Isabella Stewart Gardner.152 While it might seem incredible that Shinn skipped over Gardner’s remarkable collection, it was of minuscule proportions when he was in Boston in the 1870s, and there was no indication then that it would become the nucleus of an entire museum. Initially consisting of only a few French paintings, textiles, and objets d’art, Gardner’s acquisitions would blossom into a definitive declaration of the Gilded Age woman’s psychological relationship with objects.153 The fusion between the collector and her collection was so firmly welded that there was no discernible separation between self and things. “Things,” according to Bill Brown’s expansive reading, invoke a rapport between “possessions and possession.”154 He defines “thingness” as “what is excessive in objects—what exceeds their mere materialization. . . . the magic by which objects become values.”155 To Gardner, the values she embedded in her art objects shifted as she moved through life. Significantly,

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

87

28. Isabella Stewart Gardner residence, 152 Beacon Street, Boston, 1900. Photo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

she first turned to collecting as a solace following the death of her two-year-old son, but even after she recovered from her loss, her possessions continued to feature in her fantasy life. Like Mary Morgan, Gardner daydreamed about the art she wanted to own, confessing to Bernard Berenson after she consulted him about the purchase of a painting by Titian: “I am breathless about the Europa, even yet. . . . sitting for hours in my Italian Garden in Brookline, thinking and dreaming about her.”156 Collecting oªered Gardner a space of psychic repose where she could lose herself in fantasy and channel her formidable energy into creative self-expression. Although her intimate relations with objects extended into the male-dominated realm of the fine arts, she refused to embrace the teleological practice of collecting chronologically: Gardner rejected Berenson’s suggestion that she focus sequentially on particular schools of painting.157 Her modus operandi resembled that of other Gilded Age women collectors who absorbed painting into an overall decorative scheme that served their emotional need for reflection and self-articulation. In the home on Beacon Street in Boston where Gardner lived in the 1890s—before she built Fenway Court, the house that contains her museum today—every ledge and surface contained personal treasures that could function as transitional objects to comfort her (fig. 28). She blended together tapestries, textiles, carvings, and various objets d’art with painting and sculpture to create an independent work of art. She did not give priority to the painting above the sofa over the textile that artfully hung from the doorway to the right or the mounted panels and carved reliefs that circled the room. Gardner also intermingled liturgical vestments, embroideries, and fine damasks with smaller paintings and pieces of sculpture, creating an aura that, as Brown contends, lent a doubleness to objects that concealed their exchange value as commodities.158 That this aura emanated from Gardner herself was recognized by John Singer Sargent in the portrait he painted of her in 1887–88 (fig. 29). A nimbus radiates outward from Gardner, who is posed against a backdrop resembling the intricate pattern in the embroideries she collected. Although her black gown separates her from the background, her head is wreathed in pulsating bands, suggesting that the design is a visual manifestation of her thought and thus an integral part of her. Introduced to Sargent by Henry James, Gardner provided rich fodder for both the artist and the novelist. She inspired several of James’s characters, notably Isabel Archer in The Portrait of a Lady, who is given a lesson about the meaning of life by the older Madame Merle in a passage that is a verbal analogue to Sargent’s portrait of Gardner. Madame Merle reflects: “What shall we call our ‘self ’? Where does it begin? Where does it end? It overflows into everything that belongs to us—and then it flows back again.”159 This answer to the riddle of existence rests in the correlative between self and possessions that Sargent represents in Gardner’s portrait. Gardner carried this sense of embodiment over to the interior design of Fenway Court, where she so closely identified with her selections and arrangements that she insisted that not a single object be moved or rearranged after she bequeathed her home to the public as a museum. Although she eliminated some of the crowding evident in her Beacon Hill interior, she nonetheless preserved the organic harmony between the fine and

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

89

29. John Singer Sargent, Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887–88, oil on canvas, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

decorative arts that was the Gilded Age woman’s signature style. In the Titian room, Gardner integrated the artist’s Rape of Europa into her decorative scheme by hanging it above a piece of pale green and silver silk taken from one of her ball gowns, where it remains today (fig. 30). By incorporating a garment she had worn on her own body into a room destined to be viewed by the public, Gardner reified herself as a museum object and inserted her indelible, lasting presence into her crowning achievement.160 Stamping her museum with the motto “C’est mon plaisir,” Gardner echoed the philosophy of Mary Telfair, who had endowed her home as a museum a quarter of a century earlier. Both women sought personal pleasure from art and demonstrated Walter Benjamin’s contention that “possession is the altogether deepest relationship one can possibly have to objects.”161 Yet both also felt compelled to share this intimacy with the public. A second interpretation of Gardner’s “C’est mon plaisir” is its idiomatic use as a polite response to being thanked, implying that part of her pleasure rested in the acknowledgment she received for announcing her magnanimous gift. Like Telfair, Gardner had raised her sights beyond her home and expressed concern about the paucity of museums in this country. She elucidated: “Years ago I decided that the greatest need in our Country was Art. We were largely developing the other sides. We were a very young country and had very few opportunities of seeing beautiful things, works of art, etc. So I determined to make it my life work if I could.”162 Her museum provides an insight into the fantasy life of Gilded Age women who narrowed the gap between the private and the public and between the decorative and the fine arts. Although Shinn was also dedicated to raising America’s level of cultural acuity, he tried to elevate the nation’s taste by pointing to the high-art collections formed by the country’s most successful businessmen. He equated aesthetic progress with economic triumph and considered these acts of cultural consumption a virtue, unlike the acquisition of decorative arts by women. The American woman was assigned the duty to represent the nation in matters of taste, but those who spent as lavishly as Isabella Stewart Gardner, Mary Morgan, and Cornelia Stewart were considered psychologically unstable and a threat to the social fabric because they did not conform to the male ideal of rational possession. In contrast, the more controlled spending and display methods of businessmen-collectors confirmed their authority as guardians of the country’s cultural capital. Despite the regendering of collecting that occurred as men dis30. Titian room, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

•

91

covered the palliative benefits of aesthetically nourishing interiors and women awakened to the expansive possibilities of the marketplace, the politics of taste dictated that women remain on the domestic side of the divide. The woman collector’s more visible role and claims to possessive individualism threatened the very structure of patriarchal society: it was a short step from exercising judgment and independence in the art world to demanding full citizenship in the republic. Harriet Spoªord articulated the integral link between home and politics in 1877: Furnishing, although largely woman’s work in the direction, is really no trivial matter, to be left contemptuously to the women and girls of the family. Its study is as important, in some respects, as the study of politics; for the private home is at the foundation of the public state, subtle and unimagined influences moulding the men who mould the state; and the history of furniture itself, indeed, involves the history of nations.163

Incisively recognizing the ideologically charged connection between taste, nationhood, and the psychology of consumption, Spoªord ennobled the invisible women who worked their magic in the home. Whereas collecting prompted increased self-expression and confidence in the Gilded Age woman, this process of individuation led the New Woman of the Progressive Era to network outside the home. Coined by Henry James to describe American women who refused to conform to societal norms, “New Women” has become a descriptive label for the social and cultural activists of the Progressive Era.164 Some forged connections with other women by joining art organizations, while others, inspired by the suªragists at the Philadelphia Centennial International Exposition, became involved in world’s fairs in Chicago and San Francisco, where they rallied for the rights of full citizenship and deftly enlisted art objects to signal their emancipatory goals. The advent of the New Woman was to have a remarkable eªect on the art scene in San Francisco in the years following Shinn’s arrival on the transcontinental railroad. He was astonished by what he discovered there and would have been even more surprised had he been able to return in 1915 to witness the Panama Pacific International Exposition, where it was evident that one San Francisco woman, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, succeeded in combining art with activism.

92

•

A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

THREE

Y Art and Activism PHOEBE APPERSON HEARST • MARY ANN DEMING CROCKER JANE LATHROP STANFORD • BERTHA HONORÉ PALMER ALVA SMITH VANDERBILT • LOUISINE ELDER HAVEMEYER

D

UBBED CALIFORNIA’S “FAIRY GODMOTHER,” Phoebe Apperson Hearst waved her magic wand over earthquake-damaged San Francisco and watched the Panama Pacific International Exposition rise from the rubble of the Marina District in 1915. “Dream City,” as the exposition came to be known, announced to the world that San Francisco not only had recovered, but was in the forefront of progressivism. After successfully lobbying Congress to choose San Francisco over New Orleans as the site of the exhibition, Hearst drew on her vast experience as an art collector, international traveler, clubwoman, fundraiser, and regent of the University of California to extend the spatial reach of the intimate female interior to encompass the larger arena of political advocacy. In her capacity as honorary president of the Women’s Board of the Panama Pacific International Exposition, she strategically showcased the advances that women had made in the arts, education, and public service. Negotiating between the value systems of the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, Hearst was a composite of the “true woman” and the “New Woman” in her allegiance to individual fantasy and self-realization on the one hand, and public service and community crusades on the other. Hearst was a late convert to the suªrage movement. Her first priorities were motherhood and economic autonomy. After meeting her in 1896, Susan B. Anthony reported to Jane Lathrop Stanford that Hearst’s political position evolved from her personal life: “She was very free in her talk—told me of her many experiences since she became manager of her estates—which have done much toward making her see and feel the need of woman’s possessing political power—as well as financial freedom—I am sure she will

93

grow into the full realization of woman’s enfranchisement.”1 Anthony proved to be correct. Hearst’s experience as a mother eventually led her to support suªrage. In 1913 she reflected on how she had arrived at this decision: I will say that I was not in favor of suªrage until the campaign in California was well on, and then certain information came to me which convinced me that the time had come— here, at any rate—when women should have the right to vote. I felt convinced then that women would unite in favoring certain work tending towards the betterment of conditions aªecting women and children particularly, which men heretofore could never be relied upon to favor when it came to the test of the ballot. I must add, however, that, while I am a suªragist, I have no sympathy whatever with the tactics of the militant suªragette.2

One can almost hear the layers of Hearst’s social conditioning falling away as she made her decision to come out in support of women’s civil rights. Her progression is typical of first-generation New Women, whose spatial parameters were defined by prescribed notions of “motherhood,” “domesticity,” “morality,” and “service,” but who raised the ceiling to embrace civic reform and “municipal housekeeping” as natural extensions of the watchdog role they had played at home.3 Few clubwomen in her generation, however, made the leap into political activism. In admitting that men “could never be relied upon” to improve “conditions aªecting women and children,” Hearst broke with her previous strategy of consensus building and moved closer to the bolder stance of the secondgeneration New Woman. Despite her aversion to overt forms of protest, she relented in 1916, at the age of seventy-four, accepting an appointment as vice-chair of the National Woman’s Party and consenting to march with suªragists in San Francisco (fig. 31).4 Hearst’s divided consciousness was apparent in the visual arts program she endorsed at the Panama Pacific Exposition, which celebrated both the traditional role of motherhood and women’s right to work, education, and governance. Hearst headed the committee that commissioned sculptor Charles Grafly to create The Pioneer Mother (fig. 32) for the Palace of Fine Arts at the exposition. As co-founder of the National Mother’s Congress, an early California settler, and an inordinately dedicated mother herself, she had definite

31. Phoebe Hearst at the San Francisco Preparedness Parade, July 22, 1916. From the San Francisco Examiner, July 23, 1916. Photo: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

94

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

32. Charles Grafly’s sculpture The Pioneer Mother, installed at the Palace of Fine Arts during the Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. From Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (New York: Putnam’s, 1921), 3:74.

ideas about the values she wished the artist to communicate. Rejecting the sculptor’s proposal of a primitive “World-Mother,” she negotiated a compromise in which Grafly emphasized the “loyalty, the fidelity, the courage and ability of the pioneer women,” while simultaneously “honoring all motherhood.”5 The commanding figure of a mother with her two small children encapsulated Hearst’s admiration for strong, independent women whose first obligation was to nurture their oªspring, while the bas-reliefs on the pedestal contrasted suªering on the immigrant trail with glorious images of the Golden Gate and Pacific Ocean, which awaited and rewarded the stalwart pioneer woman with their bounty. The subjectivity of San Francisco women in Hearst’s time was a patchwork of conflicting discourses: Christian charity and Victorian gentility vied with Gilded Age acquisitiveness and a dawning awareness of women’s right to equality. San Francisco novelist Gertrude Atherton characterized Hearst’s generation as “big-brained, whole-souled, cultured and level-headed women, some of high literary and artistic ability, each in her often

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

95

very limited sphere working out the travail of her soul alone and unsupported by the knowledge and sympathy of her fellows.”6 Once these women joined forces and applied the lessons they had learned in the domestic realm to the wider world of public service, however, they added a distinctively western slant to the composition of the New Woman in the Progressive Era. Western women’s “quest was not to establish a lofty, other-worldly abstraction called civilization but to create the institutions—the schools, churches, charity associations, reforms—that would check male inspired disorder . . . and secure a social order within which domestic virtues and family life could flourish.”7 Demanding access to the male discourse of possessive individualism, they agitated for the right to express their selfhood by voting. California women steadily campaigned for suªrage from 1871 until they were victorious in 1911, nine years before Congress ratified the Nineteenth Amendment.8 Then as now, California was in the vanguard of social change. Nowhere is this pattern more clearly etched than in the life of Phoebe Hearst. She smoothly moved beyond her assigned role as the consolidator of the family’s cultural capital to become a leader in municipal, statewide, and national aªairs. Her private experiences as wife, mother, art collector, and proprietress of several large houses all played a part in shaping her public persona as clubwoman, educator, and supporter of women’s rights. Hearst credited her success to the Pacific Coast’s less stringent attitude toward her sex, claiming that “women in California are less hampered by tradition in convention than in older communities. This is their share in the glorious freedom of the West.”9 Unlike those women of the Gilded Age who were content with spatial intimacy, she explored the still novel territory of women’s intellectual, economic, and political advancement, sharing the ambitions of the Progressive Era. In this chapter I will examine Hearst in relation to a like-minded group of women, all of whom escaped from gilded cocoons and spread their wings by combining art and activism. Bertha Honoré Palmer, Alva Smith Vanderbilt, and Louisine Elder Havemeyer each drew on her experiences in the art world to design events that endorsed women’s rights. Whereas Palmer, in Chicago, and Hearst, in San Francisco, turned to world’s fairs as staging grounds for their personal and political causes, Havemeyer curated art exhibitions to benefit women’s suªrage in New York, where she followed a more militant path, as did Vanderbilt in Newport and Washington, DC. These four women were instrumental in both the campaign for women’s suªrage and the feminization of culture, national phenomena that were alarming mandarins of politics and culture on both coasts as American women insisted that the altruism, compassion, and sense of community ascribed to them were essential to public life and good government. Symptomatic of the reforming impulse that swept the country in response to the problems created by industrialism, urbanism, and mass immigration, these communal endeavors focused on improving women’s position in society and provided Hearst, Palmer, Havemeyer, and Vanderbilt with a forum for their social concerns and managerial skills. Their eªorts signal women’s transition from the intensive individualism and psychological probing that marked the Gilded Age to the commitment to connectivity and female networking of the Progressive Era.

96

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

Although these collectors diªered in age, location, and degree of political involvement, they were united in their struggle for women’s spatial representation in a world defined by gendered power relations. Feminist geographers, sociologists, and anthropologists have long maintained that space is an abstract concept formulated by historically specific customs, behaviors, and sexual politics.10 The theorist Laura Mulvey elaborates on this idea, observing that masculine space is generically presented as “outside, the sphere of adventure, movement, and cathartic action” in contrast to feminine “emotion, immobility, enclosed space, and confinement.” She prudently notes, however, that female subjectivity is more psychoanalytically complex than this binary opposition allows.11 This observation is borne out by Hearst and the other women who are the subject of this chapter. In their commitment to art and activism, they traversed spatial realms that sometimes interpenetrated, blurred, and collided. When they moved from the security of the domestic interior into what was construed as masculine public space, they maintained an emotional attachment to objects and frequently reverted to their homes in search of reassuring and more familiar forms of comfort. The spatial maps of California women diverged from those of their Atlantic sisters due to the less calcified lifestyle of the Pacific region, which oªered them greater opportunities to establish independent identities. When Earl Shinn arrived in San Francisco on the new transcontinental railway in 1877, he included six women among the fifteen collectors whose works he surveyed, a higher proportion than in any other city he visited for his Art Treasures of America.12 Before I introduce the broader topic of American women’s progression from decorating the home to campaigning for equality, I will examine Shinn’s response to the San Francisco art scene. San Francisco women art enthusiasts enjoyed an open playing field due to the late arrival of the city’s wealthiest male citizens to the worlds of philanthropy and culture. Occupied with mining the riches of America’s westernmost frontier, they left the business of refinement and benevolence in the capable hands of their wives, on whom they counted to create a high-minded atmosphere that deflected attention from their competitive and often ruthless pursuit of gold, silver, and railroad fortunes. The short-lived journal California Art Gallery expressed the hope in 1873 that an appreciation for art would “hide in some measure the hard bitter world of business.”13 That clarion call was answered by the wives of two of the “Big Four” builders of the Central Pacific Railroad, Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford. Many local residents blamed the railway men for creating unemployment in San Francisco by importing Chinese immigrant laborers who subsequently settled in the city and accepted jobs for less pay than the locals.14 Although Mary Ann Crocker’s and Jane Stanford’s community service could not compensate for the economic inequities thought to have been caused by their husbands, they ameliorated their public images by visibly distributing their wealth to worthy causes. Shinn was enthralled, if somewhat disoriented, by what greeted him in the Golden State after his long cross-country journey. Conceding that its geography challenged his sense of spatial perception, he searched for parallels in his previous experience to describe

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

97

his first impression of “the new and inartistic country of California” and poetically concluded that it suggested “the illusion of a silken Italian civilization, with all its unspeakable repose and comfort” (2:112). But Shinn found nothing “inartistic” about the contents of the private collections he visited. Much to his amazement, he discovered that many of the pictures he saw were imported or purchased directly from dealers such as Adolphe Goupil in Paris. He reflected on the remarkable way in which space had been collapsed by San Francisco’s globe-trotting collectors: The (perhaps impertinent) astonishment of visitors who find on the extreme western end of the trans-continental road a community fully conversant with modern art and furnishing Goupil with his best customers, is simply a geographical astonishment. We cannot at once get used to the idea, only proper to this century, that considerations of space are now annihilated, and that Goupil has practically no more di‹culty in placing a good picture on the coast of the Pacific than in the shadow of his own shop on the rue Chaptal. (3:41)

Perched at the edge of the continent and facing the seemingly endless expanse of the Pacific Ocean, California struck Shinn with a conundrum: How could America’s vastness have been so rapidly contained within the transnational space of the art market? While he was cognizant of the intercontinental purchasing patterns of collectors in the East, it was only after he traveled across the wilds of the prairies and crossed the rugged Sierra Nevada mountain range that the full import of the relativity of cultural space struck him. Shinn found an empirical explanation for the unexpectedly sophisticated collections he saw in California in the railroad that had delivered him to this extraordinary place “instantaneously over three thousand miles of space” (2:111). Claiming that “gracious Art follows in its wake,” he concluded: As should properly be the case, it is the railway kings, they who have made this diªusion of art-ideas possible, who are found the best patrons of art. A group of really enlightened patrons in California is one of railroad o‹cers. Among their galleries, you forget that an ocean and a mighty continent intervene, and fancy yourself in the patchouli perfume characteristic of the Paris Salon. (3:41)

Consistent with his goal of charting the cultural maturation of American businessmen, Shinn set about analyzing the art in the private galleries in the Nob Hill homes of the railway builders Charles Crocker and Leland Stanford. Crocker enthusiastically aided him in his goal by escorting Shinn on a personal tour of his gallery and regaling him with anecdotes about the circumstances behind his purchase of paintings by Jean-Léon Gérôme, Alexandre Cabanel, and other Salon artists in Paris. Shinn nonetheless allowed himself to be distracted by Mary Ann Deming Crocker’s spectacular boudoir, which he described as “a fairy cave in a crystal mountain . . . lined with that beautiful veined spar called Mexican onyx” and highlighted with silver and gold. But he abruptly redirected his

98

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

33. Art gallery and music room, Jane and Leland Stanford residence, San Francisco, photographed by Eadweard Muybridge, 1877. Photo: Stanford University Archives, PC6, box 5, pl. 31.

attention from this feminine sanctum sanctorum onto more familiar ground: what he termed “the picture-gallery proper,” which, he opined, “certainly gives a more strictly artfeeling than the choicest of boudoirs trimmed with water-color pictures and precious stone” (3:42). It was as if Shinn had to remind himself to stay focused on his mission to prove that America, from coast to coast, contained the best modern paintings of the era. The critic did not mention meeting Mary Ann Crocker, who, in any event, was not in the habit of languishing in her boudoir. Her charitable activities earned her the distinction of being the first woman to have her obituary printed on the front page of the San Francisco newspapers when she died in 1889; it would be another thirty years before Phoebe Hearst became the second woman to win that tribute. Crocker was lauded for her appreciation of art, her dedication to the Boys’ and Girls’ Aid Society, and her “greatheartedness, benevolence, [and] civic alertness.”15 She set a high standard of cultural and municipal involvement that would inspire the next generation of San Francisco women. Like Mary Ann Crocker, Jane Stanford has attained more recognition for her philanthropy than for her aesthetic sensibilities. The décor of the San Francisco home she shared with her husband, Leland Stanford, has been credited to him, despite his reputation for preferring horses and business to art.16 Appointed by the New York decorators Pottier and Stymus in the Renaissance-revival style, the house featured a combination art gallery and music room (fig. 33). A feminine touch is evident in the draped velvet portieres, tufted red velvet circular seats, and especially in the spacious and asymmetrical placement of the paintings on the walls. Airiness and variation characterize this hanging scheme, in contrast to Alexander Stewart’s claustrophobic three-tiered arrangement. Jane Stanford’s

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

99

taste, though, more closely resembled Cornelia Stewart’s: she was especially proud of her collection of laces, which were said to be “as exquisite as Marie Antoinette’s.”17 She also chose a cohesively interrelated design for her drawing room, where a repeating Pompeian motif united the ivory-toned carpet, murals, and woodwork with the frescoed ceiling.18 Despite the grand scale of the drawing room and art gallery, they conveyed the intimacy and organic unity of the female interior through their decorative embellishments. These were happy days for the Stanfords: the cloud of despair that would follow the premature death of their son, Leland Jr., in 1884, had not yet descended on them. Leland Stanford Sr. would be prompted to found a university in his son’s name, while Jane Stanford would erect the first American museum west of the Mississippi in his memory. Like Phoebe Hearst, she was exceedingly devoted to her only child and also fostered his love of collecting eclectic objects from an early age. She began planning the museum immediately after her son’s death, although it was not until she was widowed in 1893 that she brought her plan to fruition. Like Mary Morgan and so many other women, she was unable to realize her dream until she had full control of money of her own: California women were no diªerent in this regard.19 Stanford then drew on her domestic experience and, as Wanda Corn has noted, “transferred the female prerogative of being dictatorial, managerial, and authoritative in the home into the realm of public institution-building.”20 The wives of the remaining two California “Big Four” railway builders, Mark Hopkins and Collis Huntington, were uninterested in softening the contours of their husbands’ reputations by becoming involved in municipal organizations. A Nob Hill neighbor of Mary Ann Crocker and Jane Stanford, Mary Frances Sherwood Hopkins had little in common with them, as she was not involved in women’s clubs, nor was she known for her good works. The socialite novelist Gertrude Atherton found her stando‹sh, archly observing that her manners “were polaric, not from ill nature, but some sort of internal ice box. I always remember her standing still and solemn at the head of the room, clad in white and armored in diamonds.”21 Phoebe Hearst pointedly disapproved of women who wore “gorgeous jewels” and “appeared only to live for pleasure.”22 Such ostentatious displays of wealth were frowned on by the clique of wealthy San Francisco women who supported their husbands by appearing indiªerent to the self-interest and materialism driving their economic success. In the words of Nancy Hewitt, women like Hopkins who challenged the womanly values of “piety, purity, and submissiveness” were “excommunicated from polite society.”23 The chilly demeanor attributed to her suggests that Hopkins did not bother to disguise her impatience with the social protocols of the new frontier. Although Arabella Duval Yarrington Huntington became one of the most celebrated collectors associated with the Pacific Coast, she did not care for either San Francisco or Los Angeles and, like Hopkins, was indiªerent to the pioneering mentality that spurred local women to “civilize” the West. She preferred her New York residence to the Nob Hill mansion Collis Huntington purchased in 1890 in order to tend to his railroad interests.24 Phoebe Hearst was more characteristic of the San Francisco women whose training in domestic aªairs prepared them to occupy the space vacated by their husbands in the

100

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

cultural arena. While George Hearst tended to his interests in mining, oil, real estate, newspaper publishing, and politics, she first focused on acculturating herself and her son, William Randolph. Although Phoebe Hearst has been the subject of two recent studies, her activities as an art collector have not been examined, nor has her role in schooling her son in the art of collecting from a very early age. Hearst began young Will’s art education by taking him to see copies of old master paintings at Woodward’s Gardens on Mission Street in San Francisco.25 Some of these gold-framed replicas are visible in a photograph taken of the interior of the gallery in 1876 (fig. 34). Significantly, the only viewers in this photograph are women with children, who, like Hearst, pursued culture while their husbands attended to business. Hearst escorted her son on two extended European sojourns, the first in 1873, when he was ten years old and collected everything from comic books, stamps, and coins to beer steins, woodcarvings, and clocks; and the second in 1878, when, according to his proud mother, he quickly developed “a mania for antiquities.”26 Hearst herself conducted a buying spree three and a half decades long, demonstrating a “mania” for collecting that would only be rivaled by her acquisitive son. Few people realize that many of the objects on view today at Hearst Castle in San Simeon originally belonged to the newspaper tycoon’s mother. This matrilineal transference of taste also defined the relationship between San Francisco collector Louise Hungerford Mackay and her only son, Clarence, who, like William Randolph Hearst, went on to become an ardent collector of decorative and fine art.27 Phoebe Hearst and Louise Mackay had more in common than their desire to instill an enthusiasm for collecting in their sons. Their husbands’ fortunes originated not in California, but in the Comstock silver mines of neighboring Nevada.28 Both women experienced several years of financial turmoil during their marriages before their future was ensured. After they were widowed, Hearst and Mackay both erected mining buildings on university campuses as memorials to the husbands whose preoccupation with business had left them conveniently free to pursue their own interests.29 Despite these commonalities, 34. Art gallery, Woodward’s Gardens, San Francisco, 1876. Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

101

however, their paths diverged once they were financially secure. While Hearst devoted her formidable energy to education and civic causes, Mackay joined the international set. Their identities as collectors also diªered, as Hearst used art and architecture programmatically to further her cultural and political agendas, whereas Mackay viewed her acquisitions as decorative enhancements of her social status. Rebuªed by New York society in 1876, despite the sponsorship of Marietta Reed Stevens, Mackay moved to Paris with her three children.30 It was apparent when Mackay and Hearst met again a few years later that more than the North American continent and the Atlantic Ocean had separated the two women. Mackay’s psychology of space embraced the interior world of Gilded Age refinement, whereas Hearst, although a year older, directed her sights on the more expansive cultural, civic, and political spaces of the Progressive Era. Despite Mackay’s pretensions to grandeur, she was struck by Hearst’s lack of aªect when they became reacquainted at the grand party Mackay hosted for Princess Louise in London in 1889. Seeing Hearst again made Mackay realize that her elite European circle had lost touch with the naturalness evident in women of the new world. Reporting on her grandmother’s reaction, Ellin Berlin notes that Mackay was proud to have Princess Louise and the Duchess of Newcastle and the rest of her distinguished English guests see American women like Mrs. De Young31 and Mrs. Hearst. They were not brilliantly fashionable. . . . the western ladies were representative of a raw and uncivilized part of the States. But Louise thought that the princess and the duchess and many others would recognize and admire an old-fashioned gentility that in the new world, as in the old, was deeper rooted and more enduring than the ever-changing, restless elite that surrounded Mrs. Astor or the Prince of Wales.32

Mackay’s reaction reveals that beneath her worldliness and fascination with the international social set she retained a respect for the unpretentiousness of California women. Hearst’s subjectivity was shaded by a diªerent kind of internationalism owing to her fascination with world’s fairs. Beginning in 1873, with her visit to the Vienna International Exhibition, she realized the potential of these events to advance women educationally and economically. This was the first world’s fair to include a women’s building, the Pavilion der Frauenarbeiten, featuring displays of needlework and textiles, which Hearst would later promote at the Panama Pacific Exposition.33 She also studiously observed the major international exhibitions in Philadelphia in 1876 and Chicago in 1893, which demonstrated to her that women’s creativity in the decorative arts could be more than a pleasant pastime if it was channeled into paid work and recognized as equivalent to fine art. Beyond challenging the antebellum cult of domesticity, however, these two American world’s fairs alerted Hearst to the politically divisive ramifications of women activists seizing the opportunity to present their case for female equality on an international stage. The issues pertaining to gender that were to preoccupy Hearst over the next years of her

102

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

life were aired at these world’s fairs: education, work, institution building, and, last but not least, the e‹cacy of moderation over militancy. These concerns would surface again at the Panama Pacific Exposition, where, under Hearst’s leadership of the Women’s Board, priorities were shu›ed and compromises made. To understand the trajectory that art and activism followed in San Francisco in 1915, it is necessary to consider the consequences of the struggle for space that plagued women’s involvement at the Philadelphia and Chicago world’s fairs. We have seen that women’s exclusion from Memorial Hall at the Centennial International Exhibition in Philadelphia strengthened their homosocial bond and led to the construction of a separate Woman’s Pavilion. The contentious origins of the Woman’s Pavilion, combined with the National Woman Suªrage Association’s call for reform, had a beneficial eªect on women in Philadelphia and elsewhere, even among those who did not actively campaign for the vote. For many women, it showed that by working together on cultural projects they could not only experience a greater degree of independence and agency, but could also help others in their communities arrive at the same realization.34 Philadelphia men, however, regarded women’s advancement as a mixed blessing. In 1867 the diarist George Fisher dismissed the quest for female emancipation as “so absurd and so repugnant to all the feelings universally received of the true position of woman, that it would seem impossible for a scheme so extravagant to be seriously discussed.”35 On the other hand, Walter Smith, who wrote about the decorative and industrial arts for The Masterpieces of the Centennial, rather perversely supported women’s artistic training on the grounds that it would deter them from engaging in “men’s aªairs” and encourage them to leave “the ballot-box alone” and not “unsex themselves.”36 Despite his aversion to women’s suªrage, Smith accurately predicted that textile design and other forms of decorative art would produce a source of income for American women: We believe that as soon as the absurd prejudice, too long obtaining among the decayed gentility classes in this country, against manual labor for women has been overcome, that a new and powerful impetus will be given to the progress of all branches of decorative art among us. The field is an extensive one, and one peculiarly fitted for women to work with profit and success.37

Hearst’s actions at this point in time reveal a similar bifurcation: she supported selfhelp through employment in the arts but disapproved of women who openly agitated for the vote. Hearst did not altogether shirk from engaging in politics, however. As a former teacher, her conviction about the importance of early childhood development led her to campaign for women’s representation on the San Francisco school board. In her capacity as founding president of the women’s Century Club, she also urged its members to endorse female candidates. Given Hearst’s commitment to motherhood, she threw her energy into causes rooted in the home. Thus she was inspired by the decorative arts she saw in the Woman’s Pavilion in Philadelphia to introduce a training program for women

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

103

students at the University of California and to imitate Friedrich Froebel’s model kindergarten in San Francisco.38 Like many other first-generation New Women, Hearst’s homebased concerns led her to organizations of women with similar points of view. Women’s voluntary associations, as Karen Blair has so clearly demonstrated, were attractive to moderate feminists like Hearst because these women saw their intervention in community aªairs as an extension of their love of family, home, and country.39 These organizations represent a third type of human space, one that is distinct from both the private and the public, but that links the two together. In this connective interval, women learned to make the conversion from inside to outside and dependence to independence. But because it was an intermediate area, it retained many features of domesticity, which, as Cheryl Robertson contends, prepared women to launch their reform of society: “Home economics had paved the way for women’s assumption of municipal housekeeping responsibilities; interior decoration now propelled women into leadership roles as civic beautifiers.”40 The achievements of the women volunteers at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893 would clarify Hearst’s goals for the Panama Pacific International Exposition. In the meantime, she honed her voluntary, political, and cultural expertise. Hearst gained valuable national experience when she moved to Washington, DC, after her husband’s election to the U.S. Senate in 1887. There she quickly became an o‹cer in a host of women’s groups: she was appointed vice-regent for California of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association in 1889 and, in the following year, was a co-founder of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which elected her treasurer. Hearst enthusiastically supported the federation’s interests in child rearing and the education and employment of women, issues that paralleled her dedication to the kindergarten movement. In 1893 she was selected president of the national Columbia Free Kindergarten Association. She also supported a kindergarten for African American children and established a training school for their teachers.41 Her executive experience would serve her well when she returned to San Francisco. On the domestic front, Hearst strategically made the decorative arts an outlet and emblem for both her aesthetic judgment and her personal power. She turned her Washington residence at 1400 New Hampshire Avenue, near Dupont Circle, into a showplace. Purchased from former secretary of the treasury Charles S. Fairchild, the grand house represented a major acquisition for the Hearsts, since George’s early precarious mining investments and Phoebe’s Presbyterian practicality had deterred them from participating in the mansion-building craze on San Francisco’s Nob Hill.42 Phoebe spent two years renovating the house before she opened it to the public in 1889 with a gala costume ball. Decorating the interior with “pretty things” she had acquired on her trips abroad, all transported from California in two railway cars, she also commissioned American-made furniture, woodwork, and portieres, partly in response to her newfound national interests. Even though she selected a Louis XVI style for the furniture in her salon (fig. 35), the gilded and upholstered chairs were made in American workshops, as were the embroi-

104

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

35. Salon, Phoebe and George Hearst residence, Washington, DC, photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1899. Photo: Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-49937.

dered silk portieres bordered in heavy velvet.43 The formality and lack of crowding in this room designate it as a space for entertaining where Hearst could act out her new role as national clubwoman and political hostess. Delighted with the result, she commissioned a series of photographs of her interior from the aspiring woman photojournalist Frances Benjamin Johnston.44 Views of the drawing room reveal Hearst’s penchant for intermingling Barbizon and academic paintings with European tapestries, Far Eastern prayer rugs, and elaborately carved furniture, a proclivity she passed on to her son. Indeed, the tapestry visible in one of Johnston’s photographs (fig. 36), The Art of War: Recounter, is on view at San Simeon today and was widely admired at the time Hearst purchased it. Deemed by The Collector “a superb battle piece of rich coloring and fine work,” it is one of a large group of distinguished tapestries that Hearst acquired, at least seventeen of which came from the Barberini Collection via Charles Ffoulke and his wife, the artist Sarah Cushing, who lived nearby, on Massachusetts Avenue.45 Given the house’s public function, Hearst did not allow her collection of objects to engulf its interior spaces. Contemporary pundits congratulated her for creating an atmosphere that was “at once homelike and a marvel of elegant simplicity.” George Hearst, however, preferred the house’s more intimate spaces, such as the cozy inglenook in the dining room and his basement o‹ce and den.46

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

105

36. Drawing room, Phoebe and George Hearst residence, Washington, DC, photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1899. Photo: Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-56994.

A concession by Phoebe to her husband, this area of the Hearsts’ home speaks to a division between private and public that would disappear in her widowhood. After her husband’s death in 1891, Hearst moved her home base back to California and traveled more extensively to improve her knowledge of art and world’s fairs. One of the express purposes of her 1892 journey to Europe was to expand her knowledge of design and architecture. Considering her interest in women’s art-making and the decorative arts, it is likely that while in Paris she saw the First Exhibition of the Arts of Woman. The categories of goods on display matched the mixture of fine and decorative arts in Hearst’s personal collection: tapestries, embroidery, painting, engraving, and textiles.47 According to Deborah Silverman, French o‹cials emphasized a “tradition of women’s central role in the decorative arts . . . based on organicism, the luxury crafts, and female allies and producers.”48 Although this feminization of aesthetics describes the taste that Hearst displayed in her Washington house and the hacienda that she would build and furnish for herself in California in 1897, it does not accurately portray the public position she assumed at the Panama Pacific Exposition, where she attempted a more inclusive gendering of culture. That was a lesson she learned by studying the deft work of Bertha Palmer in Chicago in 1893.

106

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

Although Palmer was seven years younger than Hearst and there is no evidence that the two women ever met, Palmer’s position as president of the Board of Lady Managers of the World’s Columbian Exposition provided a vital precedent for the older woman when she assumed a similar standing in San Francisco. Palmer proved that it was possible for a rich woman without professional credentials or a college education to win the respect of both sexes on an international playing field through drive, determination, and planning. Having shrewdly obtained the money to construct a women’s building directly from Congress, Palmer avoided the fractious situation that had arisen in Philadelphia. She wryly observed with some satisfaction: “Even more important than the discovery of Columbus, which we are gathered together to celebrate, is the fact that the General Government has just discovered women.”49 She next organized a design competition and selected a woman architect, Sophia Hayden, just as Hearst would turn to Julia Morgan in San Francisco. Palmer and her Board of Lady Managers then proceeded to fill the building with displays charting women’s advancement over the previous four hundred years. The interior featured an ivory-and-white-toned central Hall of Honor with arched galleries on its upper registers that housed various displays, including a model kitchen, kindergarten, and hospital, as well as both foreign and American exhibitions of women’s fine and decorative art.50 Palmer had the good sense to appoint a color coordinator to provide an overarching sense of unity to the displays in the Woman’s Building. Her choice was Candace Wheeler, who had been encouraged to become a textile designer after viewing the Woman’s Pavilion in Philadelphia; this, in turn, had led to her career as an interior designer. She was a logical choice for Palmer since they were aesthetically attuned, having collaborated in 1884 when Palmer commissioned Louis Comfort Tiªany and Wheeler to decorate her Chicago mansion.51 Moreover, Palmer and Wheeler were politically attuned, both firmly believing that women’s economic self-su‹ciency should take precedence over political independence. The year before the Columbian Exposition opened, in an article for the Christian Union, Wheeler expressed her ideas about the New Woman, whom she characterized as coming from the same class as wealthy women of leisure but having faced financial reversals that forced her to earn a living. She praised the skills and adaptability of this new breed of woman: “The work which the new woman is doing is as valuable and necessary as the work of men, and is indeed a part of it. We find her everywhere. . . . There is no center of intellectual labor or skilled manipulation where the woman does not find her work waiting for her.”52 To Wheeler, employment was essential to this emerging type, whom she contrasted with “the conservative women of the family,” who hung “like an incubus upon any man or men who were theirs by right of blood.”53 But she nevertheless believed that traditional femininity should remain intact. Wheeler metaphorically made this point in a subsequent article, in which she imbued the Woman’s Building in Chicago with the qualities she most admired in her sex. She likened it to “a man’s ideal of woman—delicate, dignified, pure, and fair to look upon,” claiming that it expressed “the ‘just enough’ and ‘not too much’ of woman’s aspirations in this aspiring century.”54 This moderate stan-

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

107

dard of womanhood would find resonance with Hearst and the members of her Women’s Board, who carefully studied what had been achieved in Chicago before they advocated a similarly middling form of feminism at the Panama Pacific Exposition. Hearst traveled to the Columbian Exposition with Sarah Cooper, head of the Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, who was invited to give twelve talks about San Francisco’s success in launching early schooling for youngsters.55 Cooper’s presentations took place in the Children’s Building, which was situated next to the Woman’s Building, a model that Hearst would follow in 1915. Although Hearst was deeply interested in childhood education, she took time to observe other aspects of the exposition. Wheeler’s and Palmer’s emphasis on the need to encourage women’s emergence as a social and economic force must have provided reinforcement for her conviction that women could become self-supporting. In her opening address, Palmer posited education and a living wage as remedies to the “forced dependence and helplessness of women.” These were issues that increasingly became Hearst’s guiding principles.56 Palmer may have been victorious in achieving a separate building for women, but her struggle for space was not over: both men and women mounted challenges to her custodial rights. As entries began to pour in, male commissioners jettisoned many female exhibitors from the Departments of Fine Arts, Manufactures, and Liberal Arts and sent them to the Woman’s Building, which rapidly ran out of room and was forced to convert meeting rooms into exhibition halls. Palmer objected to the use of the Woman’s Building as overflow space. After lodging a vigorous complaint, she was relieved to report to her board members that the “assignment of space stopped.”57 The spatial demands made by disgruntled members of her own sex were not as easily resolved, however. The most sweeping criticism was launched by Susan B. Anthony, who campaigned against the concept of separate quarters for women. She disapproved of a segregated Board of Lady Managers, advocating women’s representation on the exposition’s overall administrative commission instead. Likewise, the suªragist Queen Isabella Association objected to a segregated building containing examples of women’s work. Palmer held firm to her original plan and weighted the board with clubwomen with whom she had worked in the past in Chicago’s vibrant community of voluntary associations. As a result, she faced a continual barrage of criticism from her more liberal sisters.58 Hearst must have recognized Palmer as a kindred spirit. Neither supported the militant wing of the women’s movement, preferring a form of civic maternalism emanating from a solid domestic base, which viewed motherhood as a sacred calling. Although Palmer recognized that education and training were important, she insisted that “more important than all else” was “presiding over the home. It is for this, the highest field of woman’s eªort, that the broadest training and greatest preparation are required.”59 While this platform might appear conservative today, even progressive women’s colleges like Mount Holyoke advised their turn-of-the-century students to consider the home the center of their universe and to study interior decorating in preparation for their assumed roles as wives and mothers.60 On this point, Palmer and Hearst were in accord: both saw the value

108

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

in creating stunning domestic environments that would further their social and political ambitions. Palmer held court at her mansion, The Castle, located on Chicago’s prestigious Lake Shore Drive, an area developed by her husband, the hotelier and real estate investor Potter Palmer. The rooms included a Louis XVI salon, Spanish music room, English dining room, Moorish bedroom, Flemish library, and Chinese drawing room. Widely traveled and fluent in French, Palmer exhibited a taste that was worldly and cosmopolitan, which, as Kristin Hoganson notes, was at odds with the standard ideas about households as a retreat from the world.61 America’s growing influence in international trade and politics resulted in a demand for a wider range of decorative objects. The interiors of the palatial homes George Sheldon reproduced in Artistic Houses (1883–84) reveal that this shift in taste was not limited to devotees of the Aesthetic and Arts and Crafts movements but was widespread among the moneyed elite. Richard Guy Wilson observes that the term “American Renaissance” was adopted in the Gilded Age to describe the architecture and furnishings of robber barons who resembled Italian and French merchant princes.62 They were catered to by dealers such as the Duveen brothers, who opened a branch in New York in 1886 and soon counted many of America’s richest members of society among their clients, including J. P. Morgan and Henry Frick. The Duveens promoted a notion of “cachet” based on the model of the opulent Wallace Collection in London, which blended paintings with an eclectic range of furniture, tapestries, porcelains, and bronzes. As Sir Joseph Duveen’s most recent biographer explains: “Cachet meant living appropriately, in the manner of men of style. Cultivated Europeans had . . . their collections, inherited from centuries of discriminating ancestors. . . . To own what they had once owned put selfmade men on a par with heirs to kingdoms, which in a way they were.”63 American capitalists wanted to be compared to European gentry; they “fervently endeavored to acquire cultural refinement and thereby created a look of gentility that passionately embraced a Eurocentric attitude.”64 Known as the “Queen of Chicago” and often compared to Catherine the Great, Palmer cast an aristocratic gloss over the entrepreneurial origins of her husband’s fortune.65 Her motivations, however, should also be considered in the broader context of her ambitions for her city and her country. Palmer joined the ranks of men like Shinn, Morgan, and Frick, who realized that “continued prosperity and social stability” depended on “the flourishing of American culture” and its recognition by the rest of the world.66 Her décor conveyed an international attitude and provided a suitable ambience for the receptions and dinners she hosted for the foreign dignitaries who visited Chicago in 1893. Yet it was more than a mere backdrop for her entertainments: Palmer imbued her interiors with the trappings of a masculine worldview that echoed the ambitions of the Columbian Exposition, which, in turn, celebrated America’s commercial expansion and empire building and announced its savoir faire. Palmer ambitiously added an imperial luster to the American housewife’s domestic role as “queen of the hearth” that resulted in a gendering of traditional female space. She

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

109

formally staged her rooms in a heterogeneous manner that deviated from the organic unity of feminine interiors. This is apparent in a photograph of the seventy-five-foot-long combination art gallery and ballroom (fig. 37), where vastness and variety overcome any semblance of intimacy or overall harmony. Paintings from Palmer’s collection of Romantic, Barbizon, and Impressionist art are closely packed in a three-tiered arrangement. This aspect of her gallery is similar to the method of display favored by Chicago men such as Martin Ryerson and Charles Hutchinson, who “systematically” arranged the collections they gathered for the edification of the public.67 Palmer’s artworks, however, are hung on ornate brocade walls, a somewhat softer and more tactile counterpoint. The seating areas also seem to be striving for intimacy, but the lone table in the center foreground is a little too far away from the curved settee, with its exotic leopard-skin throw, to invite a comfortable perusal of the snuªboxes that dot its surface. As a result, this room is inflected with a dissonance between the womanly notes of the pliable portieres and garlands and the manly chords struck by the rigid rows of pictures and chairs. The eªect is gendered inasmuch as it contains male and female elements, but the two do not harmonize. As a performative space for Palmer’s presentation of herself, the room captures the bold rhetoric of her public persona at the same time as it alludes to her femininity. Palmer’s sister, Ida Honoré Grant, viewed Bertha as someone closer to the masculine than the feminine end of the spectrum of gender—someone whose “law was justice rather than sentiment, whose strength was stability rather than passion.”68 These traits were evident in the businesslike way that Palmer conducted the aªairs of the Board of Lady Managers and in her roles as trustee of Northwestern University and vice president of the Chicago Civic Federation. Born in Louisville, Kentucky, Palmer enjoyed playing the part of the bejeweled Southern belle and cultivated an alluring and flirtatious manner, but that did not prevent her from holding meetings for female factory workers and women activists in her French parlor or agitating for legislation to control the conditions for women workers in sweatshops.69 Multiple facets of Palmer’s complex character emerged over time as she situated herself at the crossroads of conflicting discourses concerning femininity and women’s rights, civic reform and personal gratification, and public welfare and conspicuous consumption. Hearst had almost two decades to digest what she had seen of Palmer’s role in the Chicago exposition before she would face a similar challenge with the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Perhaps the most important lesson she learned from her visit to the Columbian Exposition was that women could be agents of social change. As her public persona unfolded over the intervening years, it became clear that her mode of administration was less dictatorial and more pragmatic than Palmer’s. She avoided the numbing social rituals of the international set as well, preferring the intellectual companionship of the New Women of the Progressive Era who valued education, professionalism, and independence. Nonetheless, her identity, like Palmer’s, emanated from the home, which she discovered while living in Washington, DC, could serve the dual functions of soothing shelter and cultural diplomacy in her pursuit of art and activism.

110

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

37. Art gallery and ballroom, The Castle, Bertha and Potter Palmer residence, Chicago, c. 1900. Photo: Chicago History Museum ICHi-01266.

Hearst’s first priority after returning to the Pacific Coast from Chicago was to create a suitable dwelling for herself that would serve as a nerve center for her diverse cultural and social projects. She was anxious to return to California, where she felt she had more room to maneuver. She divulged her reasons in an article titled “California as a Field for Women’s Activities,” declaring: “In California women have been recognized since pioneer times as physically and intellectually qualified to occupy high positions of trust and responsibility in connection with public aªairs.”70 In addition to overseeing her husband’s mining investments and keeping a close watch on her son’s publishing enterprise, Hearst continued to pursue her interests in the National Mothers’ Congress, General Federation of Women’s Clubs, Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), and multiple local causes. Although she had bought a house on Van Ness Avenue in San Francisco before leaving for Chicago, she now felt the need for a country estate that would aªord her the space to meet with her wide network of contacts and display more of her expanding art collection. Hearst conceived a fanciful retreat, expressing the hope that it would “cure” her with its “comfort,” a desire that resembles Catharine Lorillard Wolfe’s motives for creating Vinland.71 Credited by her biographer with having “a man’s brain, a man’s under-

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

111

standing, a strong man’s tenacity of purpose, [and] the far vision of a true builder,” Hearst sought a gendered form of psychic release, combining business with pleasure at her country retreat.72 The Hacienda del Pozo de Verona (House of the Wellhead from Verona) was constructed on ranch land Hearst owned in Pleasanton, thirty-five miles southeast of Berkeley. William Randolph Hearst had begun building a summer house for himself on the property without Hearst’s permission while she was away (as well as importing the antique wellhead that would provide the house with its name). Annoyed, Hearst appropriated the unfinished structure and completed it to her taste in the California Mission style.73 Set in a carefully devised dreamscape replete with shaded cloisters and pergolas draped with Japanese wisteria, the hacienda provided Hearst with a mise-en-scène in which she could act out her role as California’s fairy godmother while entertaining politicians, academics, and clubwomen. She revealed a playful side to her character when she donned period dress for her elaborate dinners, tableaux vivants, and costume balls and encouraged her guests to do the same by pointing them toward the trunks full of costumes she kept for this purpose. Under the pretext of an accepted adult ritual, enacted against the backdrop of her enormous art collection, Hearst indulged her fantasies. The anthropologist Ellen Dissanayake reminds us of the close ties between art, play, and ritual, observing that: “In its freedom from social rules, art resembles play, while in its emphasis on display and embellishment, it resembles ritual.”74 Unlike the Gilded Age women who toyed with their possessions in solitude, Hearst drew on her creative imagination to transport her guests to another time and place. In 1902 she staged a dinner in honor of Dr. George Reisner, whose archaeological expeditions in Egypt she had financed. A detailed social note in Club Life captures the exotic atmosphere Hearst produced by transforming the patio of the hacienda into the court of an ancient Egyptian house: Decorative details, colorings and designs were combined within the confines of a pavilion of blue . . . to suggest at night the intense Egyptian sky studded with constellations of electric lights. . . . Upon the table eight brass boats of true Egyptian design were laden with hundreds upon hundreds of roses. . . . The menu cards, candelabras and the various paraphernalia of the banquet tables were decorated in Egyptian symbols and characters. As a souvenir of this unique entertainment there were duplicates of a cartouche ring exhumed in exploration and an amulet, the Eye of Horus, the first for the gentlemen, and the ladies receiving the amulets. The banquet was served by attendants in modern Egyptian costume, and the music was selected from such characteristic compositions as “Aida.”75

Hearst magically engulfed her guests in her version of Never Land. She even took to wearing non-Western garments during the day, such as when she hosted a YWCA convention at the hacienda in 1913 and appeared in a Chinese silk robe (fig. 38). Caught in the web of the haute bourgeoisie, she was too reserved and self-conscious to shed layers of her inhibitions like the modern women she was photographed with were beginning to do. Instead, she added layers of disguise.

112

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

38. Phoebe Hearst (in Chinese robe) with YWCA convention attendees, Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, Pleasanton, California, 1913. Photo: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

The spell Hearst wove on her patio continued unbroken in the hacienda’s interior, which she decorated herself. In the music room (fig. 1) and library (fig. 39), she boldly mingled Persian pillows, Turkish rugs, and Phoenician glass, which she had collected on her widening travels to India, Asia, and North Africa, with her ever-growing collection of Renaissance cabinets and credenzas and French carpets and tapestries. The music room was the largest space in the house and was dramatically staged. Visitors entered on a platform raised five feet above the main floor, where they were bathed in light from the yellowglass skylight that illuminated the red terra-cotta walls and burnished furnishings. On the walls, tapestries competed with paintings by artists ranging from Nicolas Lancret to Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot.76 Hearst’s style of decoration favored densely textured ensembles over the rigid categorization and seriality of mainstream male collectors. There is a spontaneity in her arrangements that conveys the cadenced “click of things-comingtogether” described by Brenda Danet and Tamar Katriel in their study of play and aesthetics in collecting.77 A similar free-form fusion of fine and decorative arts characterized the collections of Mary Morgan and Isabella Stewart Gardner, who also led active fantasy lives. There was nothing haphazard about this method of display; the rhythmic relationship between objects expressed the owner’s finely tuned creativity. As I have argued throughout this book, women’s assigned domestic role threw them into a narrowly defined world where lambent objects assumed a value that surpassed their

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

113

39. Library, Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, Pleasanton, California. From Barr Ferree, American Estates and Gardens (New York: Munn and Company, 1904), 214.

worth in the marketplace. Indeed, such collections ignored the system of appraisal embedded in a political economy because their meaning was psychological rather than pecuniary. Walter Benjamin acknowledged the intense and “mysterious relationship to possession” produced by “the locking of individual items within a magic circle,” in which the collector “does not emphasize their functional, utilitarian value—that is, their usefulness— but studies and loves them.”78 Writing about his own collection of books, Benjamin admitted to feeling a tension between order and disorder, which can be reframed as a conflict between a propensity to categorize and classify objects and the seductive appeal of engaging with them on an emotional level. Ultimately, Benjamin does not choose one over the other but indulges in a gendered enjoyment of his library—one that is precluded in analyses that are not concerned with the myriad motivations of collectors. Nonetheless, one cannot ignore the fact that Hearst’s acquisitions exceeded her aªective needs. As vast as it was, the hacienda lacked su‹cient space for the display of her entire collection, even after she commissioned the architect Julia Morgan to expand it to fifty-five rooms. What we see in the photographs reproduced here is only a portion of what she owned, much of which was contained in boxes and chests and on shelves in a two-story storehouse on the property.79

114

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

If there is any question whether Hearst influenced her son’s compulsive collecting, this evidence should clarify the matter. Moreover, William Randolph Hearst and Julia Morgan clearly had the hacienda in mind when they collaborated on the design of his hundred-room La Cuesta Encantada (Enchanted Hill) at San Simeon. Having started collecting at ten, William was confident enough by the age of twenty-six to attempt to redirect his mother’s purchasing pattern toward the old masters. He advised her: If, instead of buying a half a dozen fairly nice things, you would wait and buy one fine thing, all would be well. As it is at present we have things scattered from New York to Washington . . . to San Francisco, more than a house could hold and yet not among them a half a dozen things that are really superb. . . . How nice it would be if we could exchange all our alleged pictures for two or three masterpieces such as I have mentioned. . . . I am not going to buy any more trinkets. . . . Save your money, Momey, and wait. . . . Get a Murillo or a Velasquez. Don’t get four or five old masters that nobody ever heard anything about.80

This is clearly an instance of the pot calling the kettle black, for William Randolph Hearst famously did not follow his own advice. From a psychological standpoint, his letter reveals how closely he identified with his mother and her possessions. As David Pugh notes in his study of masculinity, “American men unwittingly placed themselves in the dual and contradictory role of patriarch and eternal child, one the breadwinner, the other the grateful recipient of motherly attention.”81 On one level, William’s advice to his mother can be read as an attempt to extricate himself from her feminine propensity for “trinkets” in favor of the growing preference of American tycoons for masterpieces. On a deeper level, he may have been trying to gain a measure of control in his relationship with his indulgent but domineering mother, who, as George Hearst’s designated heir, exercised her right to veto or approve all of her son’s schemes.82 That he never resolved this issue is manifest in his merging of her collection with his own selections at San Simeon. Notwithstanding the density of goods on display at the hacienda, Phoebe Hearst’s California contemporaries complimented her on achieving a “hominess,” just as she had in her Washington house. One observer commented on “the distinctive atmosphere of what one may be permitted to call ‘homeness’ that pervades the place—an atmosphere which makes one think of it not so much as the Hacienda del Pozo de Verona as the House of Hospitality.”83 This, too, was an illusion, as Hearst was determined to make this extravagant setting serve her political and cultural ambitions. The botanist Luther Burbank remarked on the functionality of the hacienda’s garden: “I noted in all this work that everything had a place and everything had a use besides its ornamental value which is so rarely seen any where else.”84 Anxious to oªset the impression that she was leading a superficial existence, Hearst worked hard at conveying the purposefulness of her house and gardens. Personal pleasure ranked second to service to the polis. Much like the philanthropist Olivia Sage, Hearst was conditioned by her Presbyterian upbringing to believe that she must put her wealth to good use. Both women adopted an

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

115

“ethic of stewardship” and gained expertise in women’s voluntary associations before they embarked on philanthropic programs involving women’s work, suªrage, and art patronage. Neither wanted to overturn the Protestant male hegemony and thus pursued a tangential route by working with educated women to improve the status of their gender in society.85 Hearst’s use of art in the advancement of women was more evident after she became involved with the University of California, where, as Alexandra Nickliss observes, she practiced a distaª “gospel of wealth” that contributed to the Progressive Era’s culture of reform.86 In her capacity as regent and benefactor, Hearst strove to make the university “the Athens of the West” by endowing scholarships for women, financing archaeological expeditions, funding the Department of Anthropology, and sponsoring an international competition for the design of the campus, all of which she closely supervised.87 Hearst successfully infiltrated the sector of knowledge production that Donna Haraway wittily describes as the “teddy bear patriarchy,” where men, armed with the missionary zeal of Andrew Carnegie’s version of the “gospel of wealth,” defined the parameters of learning.88 Established in 1869, the University of California first admitted women a year later. However, Hearst and the members of the Century Club were dissatisfied with the femaleto-male ratio of the student body and pressured the legislature to admit additional women. That Hearst was interested in more than numbers is apparent in the personal role she played in the lives of female students. Two years after she was appointed a regent in 1897, she oªered to construct a meeting place for women students connected to her Berkeley home by a passageway. Designed by Bernard Maybeck in 1899, Hearst Hall became a rallying point for women’s groups who demanded to be recognized by the male-dominated administration and “exercised power on behalf of their own sex on and oª campus.”89 The interior of Hearst Hall encapsulated Hearst’s philosophy: art and architecture could mold character and inspire women to better themselves. This message was conveyed by the high windows that punctuated the vaulted ceiling, which created a spiritual ambience that augmented the aesthetic appeal of the rugs, tapestries, and paintings furnished from Hearst’s private collection (fig. 40). That this association was deliberate is apparent in the placement of a prayer rug directly beneath each painting along the side walls, a grouping that also conveys Hearst’s firm belief in the equivalence of the minor and high arts. More ideological than the décor of her home, this scheme was specifically designed to foster an aesthetic awareness and sense of purpose in Berkeley coeds. Thus Hearst did not stint on the quality of her loans: she included a spectacular set of twelve sixteenthcentury tapestries that glorify the deeds of Catherine de Medici in the persona of Queen Artemisia, who succeeded her husband, the satrap of Caria in Asia Minor, in 353 bc, a subject that was wholly appropriate to Hearst’s mission to motivate young women.90 Artemisia was noted for the attention she paid to her son’s education while she held the kingdom in trust for him, much as Hearst kept a close watch on William during his years at St. Paul’s and Harvard. Artemisia’s devotion to her son, who is depicted alongside her in one of the tapestries, surrounded by artists and scholars (fig. 41), would have had a

116

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

40. Bernard Maybeck (architect), Hearst Hall, Berkeley, California, 1899. Photo: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley. 41. Guillaume Dumée, Laurent Guyot, and Henry Lerambert, The Gifts, from The Story of Queen Artemisia, c. 1611–22, tapestry, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund.

special meaning for Hearst, given her success at instilling an appreciation for art in her own child and the importance she placed on the role of motherhood in the development of the complete woman. Winifred Black Bonfils, commissioned by William Randolph Hearst to write his mother’s biography in 1928, commented on the transformative impact of Hearst Hall’s décor on young women students: Many a girl who thought that “Art” was something that had vaguely some sort of association with oil paintings and marble statues and maybe once in a while a water-color, suddenly began to realize what beauty of texture and beauty of design and beauty of coloring there could be in a Gobelin tapestry. Many a young woman who had never seen anything more beautiful in her life than a pieced silk quilt at a county fair, woke up all at once to a realization of the splendor & the comfort of beauty in draperies, in rugs and in all the various artistic appointments of artistic surroundings.91

Ever practical, Hearst wanted her surrogate daughters at the University of California to benefit from their appreciation of the decorative arts. Having awakened their aesthetic sensibilities, she encouraged them to express their creativity and finance their education at the same time by learning needlework, sewing, and other vocational skills at Hearst Domestic Industries in Berkeley. Writing to thank her benefactor, one student noted that in addition to acquiring practical skills, she had also received “a training in true womanliness.”92 “Womanliness,” as this encomium suggests, entailed self-su‹ciency as well as traditional domestic values. Hearst was especially proud of another protégé, Phyllis Ackerman, who became an arts professional and staunch supporter of her view that the decorative arts were on a par with the fine arts. After earning her degree at the University of California, Ackerman went on to gain a reputation as a weaver and international rug and textile expert in partnership with her husband, Arthur Upham Pope, who had been her professor of philosophy at Berkeley. They co-authored the fourteen-volume Survey of Persian Art in 1939 and founded the American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology in New York, which later became the Asia Institute.93 Hearst enlisted the pair to make her case for the decorative arts when she finally decided to unveil her vast collection in 1916. While she emphasized collectivity rather than individuality during the course of the Panama Pacific Exposition, as soon as it was over she showcased her private collection in the Palace of Fine Arts, in a benefit exhibition for the earthquake-damaged San Francisco Institute of Art under the sponsorship of the San Francisco Art Association.94 She filled sixteen galleries of the Palace of Fine Arts with tapestries, rugs, furniture, objets d’art, Persian manuscripts, miniatures, and lacquers, Phoenician and European glass, textiles, paintings, and drawings. The tapestries were hung in a formal arrangement that reinforced Ackerman’s thesis that they deserved the attention usually reserved for paintings (fig. 42). In an essay in the extensive catalogue that was produced for the exhibition, she boldly declared that tapestry was not

118

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

42. Tapestry gallery for exhibition Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst Loan Collection, Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, 1916. From Catalogue, Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst Loan Collection, ed. J. Nilsen Laurvik (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1917), facing p. 65.

a “mere satellite” to painting but “should stand on its own merits as an independent art.”95 Pope advanced a similar argument on behalf of oriental rugs. He insisted: This distinction between the major and minor arts is a Western invention, unknown to the artistically wise East, and many true lovers of art, even in the West, have long suspected that the distinction between the major and minor arts is really invidious and unnecessary; that the exalting of one art at the expense of another is profitless. . . . This for the average American is a hard saying. (71)

In making Hearst’s case for the equality of the arts, Ackerman and Pope validated the catholic range of her collection. Their scholarly approach and the museumlike presentation of the exhibition worked together to authenticate her choices. Although the decorative arts were represented in greater number among the works on display, Hearst made no attempt to claim their superiority over the fine arts. Rather, her aesthetic philosophy, like her social philosophy, was based on the merger of ideas. The same applied to her management style at the Panama Pacific Exposition, where she blended practicality and fantasy. Hearst’s intrepid intervention into the masculine spatial realm of rational civic planning at the University of California and her success in mastering the art of illusion in the entertainments she staged at the hacienda had both equally prepared her for the chal-

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

119

lenge of the Panama Pacific International Exposition, familiarly known in 1915 as “Dream City” or “Jewel City.” Michel Foucault distinguishes between utopian conceptions, like Hearst’s idealistic vision for the University of California campus, and heterotopias, such as fairs and festivals, which he claims “create a space of illusion that is other than real space,” adding that without them “dreams dry up.”96 If ever a carefully manufactured illusion was needed, it was in early-twentieth-century San Francisco, which, in 1911, when Hearst was asked to be president of the Women’s Board, was still struggling to rise from the ashes of the devastating earthquake and fire of 1906. She had learned of the catastrophe while traveling in Europe and had been wracked with guilt over not being there to help.97 When invited to serve as president of the Women’s Board, Hearst agreed on the condition that she serve as “honorary” president only, citing her rapidly approaching seventieth birthday. The distinction was moot, given her tendency to throw herself wholeheartedly into any project she undertook: she attended weekly meetings and conferred on all major decisions with Women’s Board president Helen Peck Sanborn, whom she had known since the latter was a child and who eagerly carried out her wishes. By drawing on her lifelong experience as a clubwoman and her firsthand knowledge of previous world’s fairs, Hearst used her position as a platform to bring attention to her favorite causes: motherhood, women’s work, the kindergarten movement, and the beneficial influence of the arts. Why, then, did Hearst not insist that there be a separate women’s building at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, as there had been in Philadelphia and Chicago? There is no simple answer to that question. To understand why, we need to consider recent events in local, state, and national history. San Franciscans of both genders had joined forces and worked closely together following the earthquake and subsequent fire. According to Anna Pratt Simpson, author of a book about the Panama Pacific Exposition titled Problems Women Solved, women who were “used to comforts always and conveniences at every hand, worked without a murmur to aid the men upon whom rested the responsibilities of reconstruction.”98 Similarly, when it came to the exposition, Simpson argues, teamwork was a key factor in the exposition’s success. (Simpson subtitles her book What Vision, Enthusiasm, Work and Co-Operation Accomplished.) That this spirit of collaboration drove the decisions made by the Women’s Board was succinctly summarized by its president, who pronounced: “There is no women’s building at the exposition, as the men and women of California are accustomed to working together.”99 This remark describes not only the community’s cohesive response to the earthquake, but also the alliance responsible for winning passage of the suªrage amendment by the California legislature in 1911. Inspired by women activists at the Columbian Exposition in 1893, California suªragists had held a Woman’s Congress in San Francisco two years later to draft a state referendum. After the referendum was defeated in 1896, they forged an alliance with clubwomen and concentrated on civic reforms that embodied the Progressive Era’s concerns with working and living conditions, education, political corruption, and city beautification

120

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

programs. But it was only after suªragists and elite women reached out to working women, trade unions, and progressive men that they were victorious in their bid for voting rights for women. Consequently, feminist rhetoric was toned down to satisfy this more diverse constituency: the California women’s movement emphasized “womanly politics—those that were moral, altruistic, and civic minded” and thus “represented a transformation that both challenged and maintained traditional notions of gender.”100 This delicate balance between radicalism and convention characterized the representation of women at the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Since the mediations that resulted in California women winning the right to vote were taking place at the same time that the overall conception of the Panama Pacific Exposition was being developed, the negotiations permeated its philosophy. The director of the exposition, Dr. Frederick Skiª, who had been imported from Chicago for the job, echoed the rhetoric of the suªrage campaign when he declared: “You do not want a Women’s Building. Women want to come in on an equality with men.”101 With the blessing of the Women’s Board, Skiª spread women’s creative entries throughout the fair, from the YWCA Building to the Palace of Varied Industries, and intermingled artworks by male and female sculptors on the grounds.102 To many observers, the place of women at the exposition encapsulated the changes that were taking place across the nation as second-generation New Women made further inroads into the public sphere. To others, the exposition downplayed women’s presence under the guise of equality. Frances Groª, writing in Sunset magazine, complained that, while “Dr. Skiª had battled sex segregation in exhibits, holding women entitled to equal treatment with men,” women’s contributions at the exposition were “pitifully small.”103 By the same token, others objected to the exposition’s contradictory recognition of the national campaign for suªrage. Even though space was allocated to the Congressional Union for Women Suªrage in the Palace of Education, where its supporters displayed a banner bearing the words of the Susan B. Anthony amendment and gathered more than half a million signatures on a petition to Congress demanding passage of the Nineteenth Amendment, the cause was mocked elsewhere on the grounds. A ninety-foot caricature of a bannerwaving suªragette named “Panama Pankaline Imogene Equalrights” was startlingly positioned at the entrance to the exposition’s amusement zone. A contemporary photograph of the site shows a freakishly tall, flat-chested woman beating a drum with a long stick, towering over an array of grotesque imaginary creatures (fig. 43). Although the National Woman Suªrage Association registered an o‹cial protest, the statue remained in place for the duration of the exposition.104 Neither Hearst nor the other civic maternalists on the Women’s Board lodged a formal complaint. San Francisco women in 1915 were typical of the first-generation New Women, whom Carroll Smith-Rosenberg describes as reworking rather than rejecting true womanhood. Because their campaign for legal and political rights emanated from the home, their training as nurturers and peacekeepers prepped them to promote harmony between their mod-

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

121

43. “Panama Pankaline Imogene Equalrights” (right foreground) at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. From Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (New York: Putnam’s, 1921), 2:350.

erate outlook as domestic feminists and the uncompromising position of more vociferous members of their sex.105 Hearst expressed decidedly more progressive values, however, in her sponsorship of the YWCA Building at the Panama Pacific International Exposition. Consistent with her support of female students at Berkeley, she was anxious to foster independence among young urban women by providing them with temporary housing, vocational classes, and recreational facilities. Hearst had been involved with the YWCA since 1910, when she agreed to become honorary president of the San Francisco chapter after its vice president convinced her that without her, it “would really seem ‘Hamlet’—with Hamlet left out.”106 While Hearst’s name no doubt lent luster to the local chapter, from her perspective its program was a logical continuation of her work with undergraduates. She oªered the YWCA’s young working members the same degree of hospitality that she had aªorded students in her Berkeley home. When the hotel where its national delegates were scheduled to meet in 1912 caught fire, she invited all three hundred women to stay at her hacienda and hold their conference there. By transforming the domestic into a site for feminine authority, Hearst eªectively integrated the private and public spaces of her life. In the YWCA’s emphasis on achieving “noble womanhood” through self-support and public

122

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

44. Julia Morgan (architect), interior of the YWCA Building, Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915. Copyright: YWCA of the USA. Photo: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

service, she found an outlet that allowed her to move forward without radically altering her existing principles. At Hearst’s urging, Julia Morgan was hired to design the interior of the YWCA Building at the Panama Pacific Exposition. Their collaboration resulted in a showcase for women’s organizational and moneymaking skills.107 In contrast to its Beaux Arts exterior, the interior of the YWCA Building was a streamlined, functional space (fig. 44). Its circular information desk, designed for maximum e‹ciency, is separated from the more casual space of the cafeteria by a sunny staircase leading to a mezzanine with an additional luncheon area, o‹ces, reading rooms, a rest room with beds, and an auditorium. Although the journalist Groª was critical of the amount of space that was granted to women elsewhere at the exposition, she extolled the merits of the YWCA Building and its outreach program: Its interior is the only architectural work of any importance in the Exposition entrusted to a woman architect, and the remarkable airy, cheery, welcoming arrangement reflects much credit upon Miss Julia Morgan. . . . On the second floor are kitchens, o‹ces, club rooms, a rest room with trained nurse in attendance, and an assembly hall seating 250 people,

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

123

which is available free of charge to suitable organizations. Prominent men and women speak here on home economics, hygiene, physical training and recreation, thrift and economy and kindred subjects. Jane Addams will be among the lecturers this summer. There are classes and social gatherings for the girl employees on the grounds; and the association is endeavoring through what is called “The Big Sister” work, to see that girls discharged from the various concessions shall not drift out into the city friendless, discouraged and open to temptation.108

A collaboration between the YWCA and the Travelers’ Aid Society, the “Big Sister” project was initiated by Hearst and the members of the Women’s Board, who were alarmed by the startling number of deaths and disappearances of young women at the Columbian Exposition in Chicago.109 Although the YWCA had oªered protection to travelers for the previous twenty years, it was not equipped to deal with the thousands of visitors to the Panama Pacific International Exposition. The Women’s Board enlisted volunteers who met every train and boat arriving in San Francisco and provided solitary women travelers with a list of suitable homes and hotels. In addition, they supervised rest rooms outside the YWCA Building, such as in the Palace of Education and the Palace of Horticulture. The rest rooms were open to the exposition’s female workers, who, in a gesture of class inversion, were served by auxiliary members of the Women’s Board. To ensure that the Travelers’ Aid Society of California continued its work after the exposition, the Women’s Board donated $20,000 to the organization from the profits it had earned in its lunch rooms.110 The achievements of the YWCA Building were not won without a struggle for space, however. The YWCA was originally planned to be placed in the California Building, and it was only after Hearst, Sanborn, and Grace Dodge, the president of the national YWCA, deemed the quarters too cramped that Hearst spearheaded a campaign to raise funds for a separate building.111 At the same time, she maintained the right to house the Women’s Board in the California Building, which ensured that it would have greater visibility than it would have had in the bustling YWCA structure. Hearst then assumed the dual responsibility of decorating the entire building and hosting all of the state’s o‹cial functions, developing a strategy for the building’s use that integrated art and activism. In contrast to the compact and functional design of the YWCA Building, the California Building was a sprawling, iconographically charged celebration of women’s notable contributions to the state’s development (fig. 45). Spread over five acres and designed, like Hearst’s hacienda, in the California Mission style, it oªered a dreamlike setting for her extravagant entertainments. Whereas the YWCA Building represented work, the California Building signified play and fantasy. Even the eminently practical Anna Pratt Simpson was swept away by its enchanting courtyards, lush landscaping, and dazzling views of the surrounding pastel-colored structures. She admitted that the California Building was “so picturesque that it was a constant stimulus to playful imagination. Every phase of the life there contributed to the living-in-a- story-book feeling that was one of the real

124

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

45. California Building, Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915. From Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (New York: Putnam’s, 1921), 3:54.

delights of the wonderful year.”112 The eªect was similar to the imaginative world described by Freud that emanates from child’s play and is continued by creative people into adulthood.113 After visiting the exposition while it was under construction, the Boston suªragette Inez Haynes Gillmore marveled at the tendency of Californians to “make of every task, a game and a play and a lark—a joy and a delight—even though they were building under the most discouraging conditions that an exposition ever encountered.”114 With the California Building, Hearst, a skillful conjurer, created a magical world in which women graciously represented the epitome of the state’s citizenry. Hearst cast her spell over California’s most distinguished guests in the functions she hosted for some four thousand people amidst a rich selection of decorative and fine arts. Visitors were prepared for the experience by a painting she commissioned for the reception area, Blessing the Flowers by Orrin Peck, her artist-in-residence at the hacienda and the brother of Women’s Board president Helen Peck Sanborn. Hearst also displayed four Gobelin tapestries from her collection in the reception area, and coordinated the color scheme of the room to harmonize with them (fig. 46). She commissioned several rugs from Scotland in similar hues of travertine, ruby red, and black, a palette that was continued in the foyer and in the ballroom, where a festive pink tone was added to entice the public to attend free Sunday afternoon “dansants.” Hearst’s scheme for the women’s boardroom was more dramatic: she mingled three additional Gobelin tapestries from her collection with wall hangings from the Herter Looms, which she oªset with red lacquer furniture that introduced a more modern note and suggested the work conducted there was sharply focused and demanded attention.115 The communications that emanated from this command post were couched in more muted language, however, in keeping with Hearst’s desire to represent California women as capable but cooperative. By visually aligning women’s suªrage with California’s rich history and future poten-

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

125

46. Foyer and reception room, California Building, Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915. From Anna Pratt Simpson, Problems Women Solved: Being the Story of the Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: Woman’s Board, 1915), 187.

tial, Hearst conveyed the message that its female citizens were capable of contributing on an equal basis with men. She made this clear in 1915 when she wrote: The enfranchisement of women in California was the logical result of . . . not a whim or sentiment of men, for whims and sentiments were generally against it. It was an irresistible evolution from California experience, and it stands as a surety to coming women that they will be free to act in public aªairs and in their own business and that they will be appreciated and judged just as men are in similar undertakings.116

126

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

This message was iconographically expressed in an Arcadian fifty-two-foot-long mural by Florence Lundborg. Variously titled The Riches of California or The Season of Fruits, the mural covered the entire north wall of the tearoom in the California Building (plate 8). Its subject was inspired by a line from Theocritus, lettered across the top of the composition: “All breathes the scent of the opulent summer—the season of fruits.”117 Both text and imagery evoke California’s bountiful natural riches, lush landscape, and caressing atmosphere. Employing a warm palette of cadmium yellow, mandarin orange, and mushroom beige, Lundborg conveyed a mood of peace and plenty. The commissioning of this work by the Women’s Board, the gender of its creator, and the fact that most of the figures pictured in it are female make it a strong statement about the indispensable role of women in sustaining California’s productivity. Although Lundborg included some male participants in her image, they are outnumbered by the female workers, mirroring the division of labor involved in the recent suªrage campaign in California, where women activists outnumbered men. At the same time, the gendered harmony of the image speaks to the spirit of collaboration underlying San Francisco’s recovery after the earthquake and the synergy that Hearst fostered between the sexes at the Panama Pacific International Exposition. The harmonious mood of Lundborg’s scene is in marked contrast to Mary Cassatt’s archly feminist mural at the Columbian Exposition, Modern Woman (now lost), which possibly inspired Hearst to commission Lundborg’s painting. Instead of a pastoral fantasy, Cassatt presented a vision of female autonomy where women work “for their own betterment and advancement.”118 Cassatt deliberately omitted men from her composition in accordance with her belief that American “women should be someone and not something.”119 Although twenty-two years separated Cassatt’s iconography from Lundborg’s, Cassatt was still, in 1915, staunchly feminist and continued to support the suªrage movement. The Women’s Board invited her to attend the Panama Pacific International Exposition, but the artist’s declining eyesight and reluctance to travel during the war kept her at her home in France.120 Had she managed to make the journey, would Cassatt have been inspired or disappointed by San Francisco women in 1915? Would she have applauded them for winning recognition by the state legislature? Would she have supported the ameliorating course of action they chose after the earthquake? Would she have thought that Hearst advanced or hindered the cause of her sex at the exposition? The consensus of the women volunteers at the Panama Pacific Exposition was that it was an overwhelming success due to Hearst’s leadership. A total of 114 conferences were held by women’s organizations, and over 135,000 female travelers were guided to safe havens.121 In emphasizing urban safety and self-help, San Francisco women anticipated two of the key post-suªrage concerns that would occupy their sisters across the country following the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment five years later. While some critics derided Hearst and the Women’s Board for not demanding a separate women’s pavilion to serve as a focal point for the unfinished business of universal suªrage, it can be argued that in the YWCA Building rhetoric was replaced with action. The architectural

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

127

historian Mary Pepchinski contends that there was no longer a need at the Panama Pacific Exposition for the didactic premise announced by the presence of a separate women’s building, as there had been in Philadelphia and Chicago. She argues that by 1915 the role of women in public life was accepted, with the result that in the YWCA Building “function had overtaken meaning: this building was created to serve women working and participating in the public sphere.”122 It is true that women had become more visible due to the Progressive Era’s emphasis on professional training and reform through civil advocacy. While this movement from the home to the public resulted in more influential homosocial networks, women still had no voice in national elections. That cause riveted activists on the East Coast. Louisine Havemeyer and Alva Vanderbilt vigorously campaigned for women’s rights, drawing on the visual literacy they perfected as art collectors to convey images of victory. Like Hearst, they were collectors, chatelaines of luxurious mansions, and had been indoctrinated in the cult of true womanhood but had moved on to adopt more socially progressive values. Unlike Hearst, though, Havemeyer and Vanderbilt had no hesitation about taking aggressive action to support women’s right to vote. Havemeyer marched down Fifth Avenue with the New York Women’s Political Union in 1912 and the following year helped Alice Paul found the Congressional Union for Women Suªrage, which later became the National Woman’s Party. Although Hearst served as an o‹cer in this organization, in 1915 she was preoccupied by her role as California’s elder stateswoman while Havemeyer was actively campaigning both for New York women who had not yet won the right to vote and for passage of the federal amendment. When the state referendum was defeated, she accelerated her eªorts on both the local and national fronts by becoming a key speaker for the movement. Havemeyer’s arrest in 1919 for trying to ignite an e‹gy of President Wilson at the White House qualified her to join the thirty-eight militants on the transcontinental “Prison Special” who crisscrossed the country on behalf of female emancipation.123 Collecting paintings and objets d’art helped Havemeyer cross over from her private world into the public arena of political activism, in the process developing a more integrated and confident personality. She revealed that she saw no discrepancy between the two facets of her life when she declared: “It goes without saying that my art collection also had to take part in the suªrage campaign.”124 In her autobiography, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector, Havemeyer pointedly distanced herself from elite acquaintances who felt “obliged to adapt . . . to the limitations of a woman’s sphere still cramped in its silk cocoon.”125 Her resentment toward social strictures festered after her marriage to the sugar refiner Henry Havemeyer, when polite society shunned the couple because he was divorced. Henry became even more notorious for forming the Sugar Trust, which controlled ninety-eight percent of the market. He has been considered in tandem with J. P. Morgan as a mythical symbol of the American economic power that was challenged by the Progressive Era’s reforms of “runaway capitalism.”126 Marginalized by elite society, the couple lived in comparative isolation, like Maecenas and Terentia, in their opulent

128

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

Tiªany-designed interior.127 It was only after she was widowed that Louisine, like Hearst, faced the world on her own terms and harnessed the organizational and aesthetic abilities she had perfected in her home to the cause of women’s suªrage. Havemeyer drew on her years of experience as a consumer of the fine and decorative arts to promote women’s right to vote. In 1912 she lent several Goyas and El Grecos to an exhibition benefiting women’s suªrage at Knoedler’s Gallery in New York. To attract visitors, she had posters designed in purple, white, and green—the colors of the Women’s Political Union—and draped the gallery’s entrance in the same color scheme. Inverting women’s role as targets of consumer advertising, Havemeyer appropriated its persuasive techniques to win over male voters. Scholars have tracked the symbiotic relationship between the suªrage campaign and consumer culture, noting that women’s experience as shoppers made them acutely aware of the eªectiveness of harnessing commercial space to advertise their cause. Havemeyer demonstrated how well she understood this strategy when she lent her expertise in decorating the storefront headquarters of the Women’s Political Union on Fifth Avenue with campaign literature in the union’s signature colors and arranged a display of dolls representing the history of women’s struggle.128 In 1915 she curated a second exhibition at Knoedler’s. Suªrage Loan Exhibition of Old Masters and Works by Edgar Degas and Mary Cassatt featured artworks from Havemeyer’s collection and loans from Cassatt, who urged her to “work for the suªrage,” adding, “if the world is to be saved, it will be the women who save it.”129 Havemeyer’s visual acuity also served her in good stead when she mounted the podium on behalf of women’s suªrage. For the New York statewide campaign in 1915, she developed a model of the Mayflower decorated with thirty-three red and green battery-powered electric bulbs that she called her “Ship of State” (fig. 47), which she dramatically illuminated during her speeches at garden parties and street corners at the moment she referred to women’s enlightened future. Just before activating the lights, she would pause and ask her audience: “Friends, you want to see how my ship looks? It is dark, is it not? You see there can be no light where there is no freedom, but when you men give us our freedom in November, then my ship will look like this.”130 Havemeyer recalled with pleasure that this presentation was invariably followed by great applause. Havemeyer also maximized the eªect of the golden bronze “Torch of Liberty” devised by Women’s Political Union president Harriot Stanton Blatch (the daughter of Elizabeth Cady Stanton), by comparing it to the torch held 47. Louisine Havemeyer’s “Ship of State,” Scribner’s Magazine, 71 (May 1922), 538.

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

129

48. Louisine Havemeyer passing the “Torch of Liberty,” 1915, Scribner’s Magazine, 71 (May 1922), 537.

aloft by the Statue of Liberty. As it was passed from state to state during the 1915 referenda for suªrage in the Northeast, Havemeyer was captured in a photograph wearing a sash that reads “Votes for Women,” relaying the torch to a representative of the New Jersey Women’s Political Union midstream on the Hudson River (fig. 48). She recounted its eªectiveness as a symbol in her article “The Suªrage Torch: Memories of a Militant”: I was surprised to see how it impressed audiences whose minds seemed to grasp the visualized analogy of woman’s suªrage to the Liberty Torch. . . . in Chautauqua, in the big auditorium, the audience surged around the platform where I spoke, and as I finished my speech they begged to be allowed to hold the torch, which they did with deep reverence.131

Havemeyer had learned during her years of intense domesticity to appreciate the power of objects to dazzle, comfort, and inspire. She cleverly appealed to the tactile and visual instincts of unliberated women to rally them to the cause. Despite Havemeyer’s eªorts, the suªrage vote was defeated in New York in 1915. She then turned her attention to the National Woman’s Party, where she convened with her fellow o‹cers and art activists Hearst and Vanderbilt to campaign for the Nineteenth Amendment. Vanderbilt had joined Havemeyer in the New York suªrage march in 1912, and now, four years later, carried her cause across the country to chair the Women Voters Convention at the Panama Pacific Exposition, where she was awarded a bronze medal for her contribution to the suªragist cause. Although there is no record of a meeting between her and Hearst, one suspects that it occurred, given their positions as o‹cers in

130

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

the National Woman’s Party and mutual interest in placing art and architecture at the service of the political.132 Vanderbilt employed a strategy similar to Hearst’s and Havemeyer’s by enlisting the symbolic power of art and architecture in promoting parity for women. She had mastered the three-dimensional concept of space early in life. Recalling her childhood in her unpublished autobiography, she commented: “I can remember the sustained absorption with which I planned the passage ways, doors, windows and rooms of my book-houses, and can see that this early the love of construction whether it be of a building or of a plan of activity in a movement was asserting itself.”133 She first implemented her ideas about space during her marriage to William Kissam Vanderbilt, the son of collector William H. Vanderbilt, when she collaborated with architect Richard Morris Hunt on the design of their Fifth Avenue château. The result was, in the opinion of nineteenth-century architectural critic Mariana Van Rensselaer, “the most beautiful house in New York,” and it was voted one of the ten best buildings in America in 1885. To contemporary architectural historians, it is “the first built symbol of America’s arrival on the international stage of world financial and cultural power.”134 Recognizing her talents, the American Institute of Architects elected Vanderbilt its first woman member. She next turned her attention to Newport, Rhode Island, where she again collaborated with Hunt in creating Marble House, an elaborate summer residence, which she succeeded in holding onto after her divorce in 1895. Although Vanderbilt did not become involved in the women’s movement until after the death of her second husband, Oliver Belmont, in 1908, she traced her decision to do so back to her divorce proceedings, when she discovered how unfairly women were treated by the legal system.135 Vanderbilt transformed Marble House from a domestic haven into a site for political expression and a tool for female emancipation when she hosted a series of meetings and conferences for women there. Her activities accelerated in 1913 after she commissioned Richard Morris Hunt’s sons to design a Chinese teahouse for her garden (fig. 49), where she staged suªragist rallies. Without an existing visual vocabulary to help envision women’s future, Vanderbilt sought recourse in fantasy to loosen ties with everyday reality and spark the imagination of her audience. She admitted that playing with transitional objects in her childhood had helped her to formulate her identity and prepared her for her subsequent decision to make the abrupt conversion from high society to militant reform. She recalled: “My love for my doll children and my rebellion against the superimposed restrictions of a girl’s life were bound up together.”136 Resembling an oversized dollhouse, her teahouse enabled her to forge a link between the inside world of fantasy and the outside world of political action. To celebrate the cause of the women who attended the tea parties she hosted there, Vanderbilt designed a special tea service emblazoned with the slogan “Votes for Women” (plate 9). These visual symbols proved eªective when she convened the Conference of Great Women at Marble House in 1914. The gathering attracted more than six hundred participants, including women speakers from the worlds of prison reform, labor, voluntary organizations, and trade unions. Despite the lavish scale of her

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

131

49. Chinese teahouse at Marble House, Alva Vanderbilt residence, Newport, Rhode Island. Photo: The Preservation Society of Newport County, Newport, Rhode Island.

summer home, Vanderbilt’s ideological use of Marble House provided a model for other women to transform the home into a venue for the exercise of political power. Vanderbilt also realized the necessity of marking women’s presence in public space. In 1909, after she founded the Political Equality League in New York, she rented an entire floor of a building on Fifth Avenue as headquarters for her organization and the National Woman Suªrage Association. Even more ambitiously, Vanderbilt ensured that women’s battle for the vote would not be forgotten when she commissioned a seven-ton monument featuring the founders of the women’s rights movement, Lucretia Mott, Susan B. Anthony, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, from sculptor Adelaide Johnson in 1921 for the rotunda of the U.S. Capitol (fig. 50).137 That same year, she was elected president of the National Woman’s Party, to which she gave $146,000 for a building in Washington, DC. She clearly understood the importance of spatial representation to women’s independence and how it operated on both psychic and social levels. Yet despite her contribution of essential financial support, publicity, and innovative ideas to the suªrage movement, Vanderbilt’s participation was overlooked until recently.138 Critics of female emancipation were quick to dismiss women such as Vanderbilt for their excesses and eccentricities. Even suªragists with impeccable backgrounds and less ostentatious ways suªered the sting of the male backlash that occurred. An astute observer of the American scene, Henry James considered the campaign for women’s rights the most

132

•

ART AND ACTIVISM

50. Adelaide Johnson, Portrait Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, 1921, Rotunda of United States Capitol, Washington, DC. Photo: Architect of the Capitol.

significant social change of the Gilded Era. He based the principals in his novel The Bostonians (1886) on an amalgam of several women reformers, including Susan B. Anthony, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. James expressed the viewpoint of many American males through the disdainful utterances of his character Basil Ransom: damnable feminization! I am so far from thinking, as you set forth the other night, that there is not enough woman in our general life, that it has long been pressed home to me that there is a great deal too much. The whole generation is womanized; the masculine tone is passing out of the world; it’s a feminine, a nervous, hysterical, chattering, canting age, an age of hollow phrases and false delicacy and exaggerated solicitudes and coddled sensibilities, which, if we don’t soon look out, will usher in the reign of mediocrity, of the feeblest and flattest and the most pretentious that has ever been. The masculine character, the ability to dare and endure, to know and yet not fear reality, to look the world in the face and take it for what it is—a very queer and partly very base mixture—that is what I want to preserve, or rather, as I may so, to recover; and I must tell you that I don’t in the least care what comes of you ladies while I make the attempt.139

It was not only men like Basil Ransom who still adhered to a pre–Civil War expectation of female submissiveness and believed their masculinity was challenged by women’s growing assertiveness. Progressives as well as conservatives rallied against women’s intervention into the public realm. Nowhere was the battle for control waged more vigorously than in America’s emerging modernist institutions, where the feminization of culture was perceived as a threat to the nation’s well-being.

ART AND ACTIVISM

•

133

FOUR

Y The Gendering of the Modern Museum ELEANOR AND SARAH HEWITT • AGNES ERNST MEYER • KATHERINE DREIER MAUD DALE • ABIGAIL ALDRICH ROCKEFELLER • LILLIE BLISS MARY QUINN SULLIVAN • HILLA REBAY • GERTRUDE VANDERBILT WHITNEY

E

LEANOR AND SARAH HEWITT’S MUSEUM for the Arts of Decoration, created in 1897 on the top floor of the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, founded some forty years earlier by their grandfather, seemed to be reaching back in time, in contrast to the forward-looking abstractions traditionally associated with modern art. The Hewitts’ museum presented a counterdiscourse to the austere formalist ideology of male modernism that rose to prominence in the Progressive Era. Following its opening, women were responsible for founding three major museums of modern art in New York: the Museum of Modern Art (1929), the Whitney Museum of American Art (1931), and the Museum of Non-Objective Painting (1939), later renamed the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. Moreover, women were the primary financial backers of the controversial Armory Show in 1913 and also initiated several important commercial galleries of modern art.1 Less tangible but equally significant to the emergence of modernism were the museumswithout-walls created by aesthetic activists, such as Katherine Dreier, who was the strategist behind the Société Anonyme, and Maud Dale, who staged a series of exhibitions benefiting the French Institute. In each instance, the modern was tempered with the decorative, as it was at Isabella Stewart Gardner’s museum, Fenway Court, in Boston. Even though modernism was overwhelmed by tradition at Fenway Court, it provided a proud model for merging the decorative arts with the fine arts and transforming the private into the public. Collectively, women’s engagement in modernism altered the face of American culture and announced that the female sex was a force to be contended with in the art world of the Progressive Era.

134

Because so many women were involved in promoting modern art, I employ the trope of sisterhood in this chapter as a synecdoche for the community of women who promoted the modernist ethos through their actions and collections or by launching art museums.2 Although the women in this chapter had interests in common, like biological sisters they diªered in taste and temperament. Sisterhood does not guarantee sameness or identical goals: some endorsed a modified modernist aesthetic, while others were more avant-garde. A few women championed social and sexual as well as aesthetic reform, whereas others limited themselves to a single progressive issue. None in this group agitated for the vote or marched with Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Alva Smith Vanderbilt, or Louisine Elder Havemeyer. All, however, realized that art had a mission to serve outside the home. Despite their more politically conservative bent, these female advocates of modernism entertained utopian fantasies of betterment. Rather than turning away from dystopian modern society, they entered its urban core and established cultural bulkheads against runaway selfinterest in the public domain by preserving a link with domestic values, either through their method of displaying art or by their acts of civic housekeeping. It did not take long before women’s highly visible role excited a rearguard reaction among male aesthetes and defenders of culture. In 1911 Henry James’s fellow Bostonian George Santayana lamented the influence of “genteel ladies” over American arts and letters—a rather surprising remark, considering that he was a member of Isabella Stewart Gardner’s inner circle.3 He was not alone in treating the figure of the matriarch as a scapegoat for the feminization of culture. A year after Santayana’s remark, Earl Barnes acerbically noted: “It is not through the generosity of men that liberal culture has come into the possession of women; they have carried it by storm and have compelled capitulation.”4 Equally alarmed a decade later, a critic in the Atlantic Monthly bemoaned: “America has, in fact, become a thoroughly feminized society. . . . The men have left to [women] the intellectual and artistic culture of the country.”5 Resentment toward elite female patrons of the arts spilled over into the music world, where they were caricatured and stereotyped as “overfed, bejeweled, easily duped, mingling at afternoon concert parties with artistic geniuses, and of course either saddled with a hopelessly philistine husband or enriched by an inheritance from a conveniently dead one” (fig. 51).6 Such barbs targeted key supporters of the visual arts, such as Lillie Bliss, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and Mabel Dodge, who extended their patronage to avant-garde musicians as well. Far from idle dilettantes, these female ambassadors of modernism sacrificed much of their leisure time in launching vanguard initiatives. They served as unpaid members of arts organizations, hosted experimental salons, mentored and nurtured little-known artists, and swallowed their pride by fund-raising. The resistance that women supporters of modernism encountered turned their saga into a chronicle of achievement thwarted by rejection, often followed by intervals of retrenchment before they regrouped with renewed energy. Virginia Woolf was amazed by how much criticism was still directed at the “modern woman” as late as 1938.7 Much of the controversy centered around the contradictory definitions of what it meant to be modern and where the sexes should position themselves on

135

51. Miguel Covarrubias, “A Salon Recital of Modern Music: One of Those Awesomely Elegant Evenings Which Society Has to Suªer,” Vanity Fair, 31 (February 1929), 54.

its unstable terrain. The New York Evening Sun registered its confusion on the subject with its remark: “Some people think that women are the cause of modernism, whatever that is.”8 Women collectors of the decorative arts had increasingly become the target of purists who wanted to rid the modernist enterprise of the taint of domesticity. On the international front, the home served metonymically for the sway of the feminine, seen as sapping men of their energy. The art historian Julius Meier-Graefe attacked the premise that art should be a “gentle little housewife” who distracted “tired people after a day’s work”;

136

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

providing comfort, he argued, detracted from art’s divine mission. In England, Wyndham Lewis added his voice to this growing chorus of complaint about the domestic as an impediment to modernism. He mordantly observed in 1914 that the cult of the home had reduced modern man to “an invalid bag of mediocre nerves” living a “wretched vegetable home existence.”9 Based on a reverse causality, these arguments located nervous exhaustion in the home rather than in the individual in order to wrest art away from the sheltered feminine realm and place it in the hands of professionals who would revitalize it for consumption in the competitive marketplace. The Progressive woman’s mission to make art widely available to the public was also frowned upon by guardians of elite culture. Sally Heard Lewis was rebuªed by the collector John Quinn when she asked him to lend several of his paintings to an exhibition of contemporary art in Oregon in 1924 as a sequel to the successful show she had helped organize at the Portland Art Museum the previous year, which had featured loans from galleries in Paris and New York. Lewis had won credibility in the modern art world by helping to bring a photographic replica of the Armory Show to Portland and Minneapolis in 1913, along with the original version of one of the most contentious paintings in that exhibition, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase. Quinn was unsympathetic to her ambition to expose Oregonians to modern art. He chillingly replied: I have not bought paintings to educate the West. Your argument that “the West needs them to be awakened on behalf of the moderns” does not interest me. The West is a great country for air and sunshine and bigness. But in my opinion neither Omaha nor Kansas City nor Portland, Oregon, nor Seattle is yet up to appreciating Picasso or Matisse. Whether they will be up to that point in a hundred or two hundred years from now is a question that does not interest me. At any rate, I am not a missionary in art or an art missionary. . . . peripatetic exhibitions cheapen art. Art, great art, the great art of Matisse and Picasso is never for the mob, the herd, the great P-U-B-L-I-C.10

Known as a “collector of women” in his private life, Quinn made it clear that he did not support women’s role as “art missionaries.”11 Crushed but undefeated, Lewis and the Portland Art Museum’s director, Anna Crocker, sought loans elsewhere and successfully staged the exhibition. Women patrons on the East Coast suªered even greater ignominy. Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan spent four years planning the triumphant debut of the Museum of Modern Art, only to have their eªorts declared detrimental to the advancement of American modernism. In 1935 the museum commissioned Artemas Packard, chair of the art department at Dartmouth College, to investigate how it could best develop aesthetic values in American life. In no uncertain terms he advised that power should be wrested from women: One of the greatest barriers to the healthy development of Art interest in America is unquestionably the fact that it has been so largely cultivated hitherto as an interest peculiar

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

137

to women. Whatever may have been the causes for this extraordinary fact in our national history and however deeply our society is indebted to women and women’s organizations for the preservation of aesthetic interest during a century or more of cultural chaos, there are no good reasons at the present time for perpetuating the anomaly.12

The not-so-subtle allusion to the unhealthy influence of women was an insidious refrain. It had been voiced fifteen years earlier by art and music critic Paul Rosenfeld, who complained that “the control by women of art is not the health of art.”13 This peculiar application of medical terminology—the linking of aestheticism with disease—can be construed as an attempt by male votaries of culture to dodge the charge that they had become eªete by assigning culpability for the feminization of culture to women.14 Suspicious of the refinement inculcated by female schoolteachers and the elegant mannerisms of foreigners, many cultural commentators wrote as if their manhood were under siege. Some Progressive Era pundits read an even darker meaning into female influence. They feared that it signaled a weakening national spirit at a time when the social fabric seemed to be fraying due to the closing of the frontier, strident militarism, urban poverty, immigration, labor strikes, corporate monopolies, and, last but not least, the campaign for women’s suªrage.15 A widespread solution was to reassert masculinity as a virtue in all aspects of life. Theodore Roosevelt’s transformation from an eªete “Jane Dandy” into an advocate of manly activism and the strenuous life is well known.16 Michael Kimmel maintains that in moments of crisis, such as during the period between 1880 and 1914, American males reacted in one of three ways: they engineered an antifeminist backlash that reified women’s natural roles as wives and mothers; they instituted a pro-male counteroªensive that tried to reassert traditional masculinity; or, in a few cases, they recognized the benefits of the opposite sex and embraced feminist ideals.17 Despite the vehemence of the rearguard proponents of the antifeminist and pro-male positions, many men were inflected by feminine qualities, which opened up the possibility of locating “gendered,” or reciprocal, interstices between the sexes, even among those who were not as open-minded as the men in Kimmel’s third category. Historian Alan Trachtenberg contends that this period witnessed “the rise of a powerful idea of the feminine, of woman’s role: the dispensing of values nonmaterial, nonaggressive, nonexploitative,” which made it seem as if “the rough world of masculine enterprise had called into being its redemptive opposite.”18 And yet between these binary opposites was more nuanced ground: instead of viewing early-twentieth-century masculinity and femininity as polar opposites, it is more illuminating to assess whether the sparks that flew back and forth between the two ignited a reaction. Many men turned to the feminine sphere as a recuperative retreat at a time when American social, political, and geographical distinctions were unraveling. There they found psychological comfort in art that housebound women had relished for decades. Just as Charles Freer experienced a therapeutic release in caressing “pieces of jade with deep satisfaction and with an almost religious faith in its comforting and restorative powers,” so, too, did a host of other businessmen flee the

138

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

pressures of the modern world by embracing the decorative arts in the privacy of their homes.19 In these instances there was a fluid interplay between gendered identities and aesthetic codes. The financial tycoon J. P. Morgan forged a passionate relationship with the objets d’art in his collection during his frequent bouts of illness, depression, and nervous exhaustion. From early childhood, his descriptions of the objects he possessed “reveal the intensity of his observation and his love of craftsmanship for its own sake.”20 Yet Morgan’s strong emotional attachment to beautiful things did not prevent him from viewing them with the organizational eye that served him so well in his commercial enterprises. He made lists of everything he owned and kept detailed accounts of his purchases, in the taxonomic manner associated with male collectors. He also exhibited stereotypically masculine characteristics when he aggressively competed for rare objects, like “a hunter of big game.”21 This trait was balanced by Morgan’s tender and sensuous response to his treasured ivories, enamels, boiserie, jewelry, and porcelain, which struck his doctor’s wife as “intense as a woman’s.”22 Taken in tandem with women’s more assertive leadership in the art market and civic aªairs, this masculinist enjoyment of privatized aesthetic pleasure loosened the stereotypes and resulted in a sexing of taste that blended traditionally male and female outlooks. Feminist scholars question narrow definitions of modernism that equate it with economic and technological advances achieved by industrialized and urbanized societies, contending that the concept has been “unconsciously gendered masculine.”23 They caution that such viewpoints “tend either to subsume women within a single unilinear logic of history, or else to position them outside of modern discourses and institutions in a zone of ahistorical, asymbolic otherness.”24 Our understanding of modernism, in other words, should be nuanced and expanded to include individual women’s perceptions of its meaning and acknowledge their place in its history. Rita Felski insists that “any adequate reading of the modern period . . . must take account of the fact that the debates over women’s public freedom, over fashion and femininity, cosmetics and home cleaning were as essential to the fabrication of modernity as Cubism, Dada or futurism, as symbolism, fragmented form or the stream-of-consciousness narrative.”25 Modernism was not a universalizing, transnational, or transcendent phenomenon, but a nationalist expression shaped by historically specific values.26 In Progressive Era America, these values resulted in a female modernist dialectic that embraced the emancipated and the traditional woman, masculine and feminine culture, high and low art, as well as allegiances to progressive and conservative causes. From the American woman’s perspective, there were many diªerent modulations and modalities of modernism. Deliberately deviating from established models, Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt consciously conceived of their Museum for the Arts of Decoration as a gendered modernist venture. Eleanor explained what modernism meant to her in a lecture she titled “The Making of a Modern Museum” in 1919 (fig. 52). She insisted that to be “modern” was to be a “pioneer blazing the trail.”27 Although her analogy was consistent with the male notion of

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

139

modernism as new and innovative, her application of the term to the museum that she and her sister founded specifically hinged on what she defined as the “modernism of its use.” She thereby associated their enterprise with the tradition of American women’s pragmatic individualism. After emphasizing that “objects are there for use,” she linked this function to her conception of modernism: The entrance of this Museum is the most modern of all; it is the main work room and laboratory, in contrast to the great hall of most Museums, delightful with empty spaciousness and with a few superlatively fine objects beautifully and singly displayed. . . . More modern than all else in the use of museums is the fact that all work, canvases, objects, etc., may be left out at the owner’s risk in the Museum at the close of the day. (17)

By elevating the use value of objects over their aesthetic value, Hewitt reversed the hierarchy cherished by avant-gardists who insisted that art should occupy an ethereal autonomous sphere divorced from life. She rejected both the disengaged attitude and the exhibition methods of what she termed the “cold tomb of the museum,” which did not invite personal involvement (18). In contrast, she described the Museum for the Arts of Decoration as a hands-on “practical working laboratory” that encouraged interaction with objects and served the entire community rather than a select group of connoisseurs. Combining the masculine language of scientific instrumentality with the feminine penchant for synergy, Hewitt’s view of modernism was expressly gendered. More involved in the dayto-day operations of the museum than her sister, Eleanor demonstrated additional gendered traits when she followed the traditionally masculine system of categorization to catalogue the nearly ten thousand objects in the collection. The inclusiveness of the museum was in marked contrast to the antidomestic battle cry of the “rationalists” who would dominate the Museum of Modern Art in the 1930s. To the Hewitt sisters, modernism signified freedom of movement, usefulness, self-help, and a sense of community. A contemporary photograph demonstrates the Hewitt sisters’ collaborative plan in action (fig. 53). In the foreground a female appren-

52. Title page of Eleanor Hewitt’s The Making of a Modern Museum (New York: Wednesday Afternoon Club, 1919; 3rd ed., New York: Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, 1941).

140

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

53. Students at the Cooper Union referring to volumes in the Decloux Collection, 1910. Photo: CooperHewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York.

tice leans intently over her sketch pad as she copies a design from one of the hundreds of scrapbooks of decorative arts laboriously assembled by Eleanor and Sarah.28 To her left, a student is absorbed in drawing one of the framed designs that cover all available wall space in a manner that recalls Gilded Age interiors, while in the background a group of women gather around a table discussing further specimens of the decorative arts. The Hewitts’ a‹nity with the female penchant for creatively arranging treasured artifacts in a tactile format is everywhere in evidence in this novel space, as is their emphasis on engagement, cooperation, and practicality. The Hewitts’ intent, like Candace Wheeler’s, who served as a trustee of the museum, was to train women to become self-supporting artists and designers. Eleanor proudly reported individual success stories, noting with satisfaction that the museum had become a “prosperous source of artistic supply for the community.”29 This outcome validated the Hewitts’ unorthodox teaching method. Scrapbooks were dismissed as ephemera because of their attention to aesthetic detail, which, according to Naomi Schor, is “doubly gendered as feminine” because of its association with both the ornamental and the every-

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

141

day.30 By making scrapbooks the centerpiece of their instruction, the Hewitt sisters professionalized an amateur art form and retroactively endowed a traditionally female pastime with symbolic cultural capital. The Hewitts’ emphasis on practicality distinguishes their museum from the private house museums conceived by women. When Isabella Stewart Gardner opened Fenway Court to the public in 1903, it was with the aim of increasing the cultural acuity of the American people in an aesthetic rather than a useful or functional manner. Her patriotic and nationalist intent diªered from the Hewitts’ pragmatism, but Gardner concurred with their emphasis on the decorative arts. The same can be said about Anna Sinton Taft and Mildred Bliss, whose houses were also endowed as museums. Although they mingled high and low arts, Taft and Bliss did not attempt to disguise the domestic origins of their creations. The Hewitts, however, moved the decorative arts away from the home into a public space, which they deliberately designated as modern. According to Anne Higonnet, who has made a study of private house museums, they are distinct from modern museums, which “display art defined as public . . . to determine the dominant register of visual culture.”31 To the Hewitts, that register was based in women’s eªorts. Desiring to promote the status of women in society, the Hewitts inverted the conventional makeup of boards and auxiliaries by appointing a majority of women to their board of directors, while the auxiliary committee they initiated in 1907 consisted solely of men.32 This role reversal resulted in a novel gendering of culture, which subverted the dichotomy of separate spheres for men and women and recognized women’s cultural authority. The fact that the Hewitts invited men to participate in their project at all speaks to their desire to continue the legacy of their grandfather, who transgressed notions of gender stereotyping when he insisted in 1853 that women be allowed to enroll in free design classes at the Cooper Union. Sympathetic to the limited options available to females, Peter Cooper wanted to rescue them from having to marry abusive men or “to resort for a livelihood to occupations which must be peculiarly revolting to the purity and sensitiveness which naturally characterize the feminine mind.”33 Wishing to honor their extraordinarily prescient grandfather, the Hewitt sisters invited men to participate in their project and to make donations. J. P. Morgan, a business associate of their father, contributed three major European collections of textiles to the museum.34 Acclaimed for modernizing the American banking system, Morgan must have recognized a similar degree of innovation in the Hewitts’ desire to make women employable in the arts and to fill the gap created by the closure of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s School of Decorative Art in 1895. Male involvement paled, however, in comparison to the eªorts of a vibrant network of females. With no paid staª, the Museum for the Arts of Decoration relied on “volunteer ladies of well-established families” to aid in its daily activities. Most of these docents, as well as the female board members and patrons, came from the Hewitt sisters’ upperclass social circle, including Alva Vanderbilt, Marietta Reed Stevens, Eleanor Blodgett, Edith Wharton, and Elsie de Wolfe.35 This mixed group of participants reflects the combination of conservative and adventurous traits that defined the sisters’ outlook. It also

142

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

suggests their debt to the model of collectivity represented by the sisterhood of Progressive Era civic maternalists who tirelessly worked to use art to soften the contours of American materialism. Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt negotiated between the male modernist view favoring the mass production of art and the female propensity for hands-on creativity, between an estimation of art as transcendent and a pragmatic evaluation of its usefulness, between an intellectual conception of museums as compendiums of knowledge and a subjective view of these institutions as inspirational spaces for individual achievement. Considering the Hewitts’ disregard for rules and their encouragement of social and economic advancement for females, it comes as a surprise to discover that they were not in favor of women’s suªrage. Sarah rebuªed Susan B. Anthony’s invitation to “lead the singing in our meeting,” even though Anthony emphatically added: “All say you must have a man to lead the singing—but I hope a woman will yet appear who can & will do it!!”36 Sharing her sister’s sentiments, Eleanor became treasurer of the New York State Association Opposed to the Extension of Suªrage to Women. Formed in 1894, this organization defined itself as “the voice of the majority of the intelligent and thinking women of this State, and as such is prepared to stand between the unwise, socialistic and illogical demands of the Woman Suªragists, and the unwise, hasty and expedient action of the Legislature.”37 It would be too simple, however, to dismiss the Hewitts as reactionaries. To be antisuªrage was not necessarily to be antifeminist: many women who opposed the privilege of voting still campaigned for better opportunities for their sex and considered themselves reformers in step with the aims of the Progressive Era. The historian Christine Stansell contends that New Women overlapped but were not necessarily synonymous with the suªragist or feminist movements. Where their interests intersected was in their rejection of traditional domestic roles.38 Numerous female reformers, like the Hewitt sisters, supported financial independence for women outside the traditional family structure but still disapproved of their battle for the vote. Kate Wells, writing in 1880, dismissed the suªragists’ ambition for its “wandering purpose,” a critique that Ella Wheeler Wilcox reiterated in 1901 in her essay “The Restlessness of the Modern Woman,” in which she derided elite women for making unreasonable “demands upon fate.”39 Like the Hewitt sisters, a good many of these social commentators did not think the time was ripe for women to vote. Theodate Pope, who founded the Hill-Stead Museum to showcase her parents’ collection of Impressionist paintings, was ostensibly a New Woman. She was educated, practiced as an architect, disparaged marriage as “the gold collar,” and espoused social reforms. Yet she signed an antisuªrage petition that was published in the Hartford Daily Courant in 1911. She insisted, however, that an asterisk appear next to her name to indicate that her opposition was limited to the next ten years.40 In her youth, Agnes Ernst Meyer matched the prototype of the fiercely independent second-generation New Woman: she worked her way through Barnard College as a journalist, traveled abroad, and disputed “the ex-cathedra pronouncements of professional pundits.” She initially resented the limitations women faced, dismissing marriage as an

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

143

institution that was “a conspiracy to flatten out my personality and cast me into a universal mold called woman.” Meyer also complained that her gender prevented her from taking a more active role in World War I, lamenting: “This is the kind of time that makes me impatient of being a woman. I want to be doing much more than I am fitted for.” But she changed her tune in the 1940s, saying that the “feminist cry for equal rights” was “pernicious.” Although she had attended Gertrude Stein’s weekly salon in Paris while studying at the Sorbonne, she now cast oª Stein’s influence, professing that she “distrusted masculine women, and found their self-assertion distasteful.”41 To add to the complexities and contradictions of her character, in her collecting Meyer transposed the usual pattern by starting with vanguard art and ending with eighteenth-century Chinese decorative arts. While it is true that these inconsistencies are indicative of the fragmented nature of modern subjectivity, one cannot discount Meyer’s desire to please men as a factor in her changeability. She fits Lois Rudnick’s definition of a “male-identified woman” who defines herself in relation to the opposite sex due to social conditioning that leads her to believe that the only route to power is through men.42 In her autobiography, Meyer confesses that her adoration of her father turned to disillusionment after he jeopardized the family’s well-being through his self-indulgences and switched from encouraging her intellectual development to opposing it.43 She subsequently searched for substitute father figures and embarked on a series of flirtatious relationships with influential men. An attractive woman whom Edward Steichen photographed and Alfred Stieglitz nicknamed “the Sun Girl,” Meyer felt conflicted about their attention and bridled at being the object of the male gaze. “Those eyes of his. I cannot get away from them, cannot guess what his greater experience can see”: she inserted this statement in Mental Reactions (fig. 54), a collage that she co-created in 1915 with the Dada artist Marius de Zayas. The collage was reproduced in 291, the journal Meyer and de Zayas had participated in founding, along with Stieglitz and several others.44 Meyer’s notations in Mental Reactions summarize the turmoil she was experiencing over her identity. She prominently displays the word “flirt” near the top of the composition, but counterbalances it with probing feminist statements: “But is it fair to the woman? Does it make her less—or more?” and “Now if I were a man I should want to prove that I had lived even more dangerously. Being a woman, I am— silent.” That same year she symbolically shed Stieglitz as her father figure when she opened the Modern Gallery with de Zayas, which Stieglitz perceived as a hostile, competitive act.45 However, Meyer had simply transferred her allegiance to her husband, Eugene Meyer, the financier and future publisher of the Washington Post, who was twelve years her senior and provided the emotional and monetary security she was seeking. Meyer’s reliance on men and her vacillation on the issue of women’s rights is indicative of the assimilationist mentality that Kathleen McCarthy contends pervaded women’s culture in the decades bracketing the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920.46 It should not be confused, however, with the gendering of culture. The first was a passive process of absorption, whereas the second was an active adoption of aesthetic values

144

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

54. Agnes Ernst Meyer and Marius de Zayas, Mental Reactions, 1915, collage, reproduced in 291, April 1915.

55. Library, The Haven, Katherine Dreier residence, West Redding, Connecticut, 1936, with Marcel Duchamp’s Tu m’ (1918) and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23), art © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris/Succession Marcel Duchamp. Photo: Katherine Dreier Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

and attitudes associated with the opposite sex. When the Hewitt sisters invited men to join their auxiliary organization, they oªered them the chance to develop sensitivity to the decorative arts and discover their palliative eªects. This negotiation between male and female players in the art world increasingly produced a slippage between gendered roles. The collectors associated with the artist Marcel Duchamp explored an array of possibilities on the gender continuum. Although neither Katherine Dreier nor Walter Arensberg indulged in the sexual role-playing Duchamp displayed in his transgendered selfportrait Rrose Sélavy, they blended established gender assignments. A staunch feminist, Dreier carried the torch passed by the women collector-activists of the previous generation and promoted female agency with a mixture of womanly circumspection and manly sense of purpose. Her political consciousness, like her predecessors’, was honed by the civic maternalist movement. She volunteered at the German Home for Recreation for Women and Children, co-founded the Little Italy Neighborhood Association in 1905, and was one of the directors of the Manhattan Trade School for Girls. Born into a family dedicated to social reform, she was a delegate to the International Woman Suªrage Alliance

146

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

56. International Exhibition of Modern Art, organized by the Société Anonyme, Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1926. Photo: Katherine Dreier Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

in Stockholm in 1911 and four years later headed the German-American Committee of the Woman Suªrage Party in New York.47 Dreier next channeled her activism into promoting modern art. Trained as an artist in New York, Paris, and London, she exhibited her paintings at the Armory Show in 1913. Seven years later she invited Duchamp to join her in founding the Société Anonyme, which encouraged a populist approach to the avant-garde.48 The Société Anonyme’s inaugural exhibition of Cubist, Constructivist, Futurist, Dada, and Bauhaus art represented the range of styles in her private collection. Dreier expressed a gendered inclination when she combined the male habit of documenting and classifying the objects she owned with a female regard for domestic display. This proclivity is evident in the library of her home, where, against a backdrop of neatly stacked books, she mingled Duchamp’s avant-garde The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even and Tu m’ with handwoven rugs, a floral table runner, and a crushed-velvet armchair (fig. 55). Her belief that the new was compatible with the traditional was also evident in her parlor, where she juxtaposed a Tiªany-style lamp and delicate porcelain vase with sculptures by Constantin Brancusi and Alexander Archipenko. Dreier again merged the avant-garde with the domestic in the Société Anonyme’s International Exhibition of Modern Art, which she curated at the Brooklyn Museum in 1926 (fig. 56). Believing that art should be linked to everyday life, she decorated four rooms

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

147

of the exhibition with middle-class furniture from a local department store to underscore the point that contemporary art could accord with an average lifestyle. In a lecture she delivered in connection with this exhibition, Dreier proselytized: “If you shut out art from the home, you are killing one of the most vital arteries of life for the nation.”49 Dreier’s social and aesthetic activism converged in her desire to enlist art to improve the lives of people of all classes. Although her path diverged from that of her sisters Mary and Margaret, who were dedicated to unionizing women workers, Dreier maintained a link with their world by lecturing about art at the Manhattan Trade School for Girls, and at the progressive League for Industrial Democracy, New School for Social Research, and Rand School of Social Science, where she also sponsored art exhibitions.50 She confessed that it had taken her “a long time to become fully convinced that what I was attempting to do was as constructive a piece of work” as Margaret’s work as president of the Women’s Trade Union League.51 Dreier remained in contact with her sister even after Margaret and her husband, Raymond Robins, moved to Chicago, where they were residents at Hull House, the settlement house established by Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr in 1889. Thus Dreier would have been familiar with the art exhibitions staged for the working class at Hull House in the years bracketing the turn of the century. Addams maintained that art was a balm to the alienated city dweller for the reason that it “causes the spectator to lose his sense of isolation.”52 Familiar with the therapeutic value of works of art, she urged harried urbanites to draw from the deep well of personal memories when entering “the realm of Art.” Addams held up the model of women’s “aesthetic sensibility” and intimate communication with objects as lessons to imitate in her book The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (1916): Many achievements of the modern movement demonstrate that woman deals most e‹ciently with fresh experiences when she coalesces them into the impressions Memory has kept in store for her. Eagerly seeking continuity with the past by her own secret tests of a‹nity, she reinforces and encourages Memory’s instinctive process of selection.53

In recognizing the social benefits of art and recommending that the modern be integrated with the past, Addams provided an important precedent for Dreier’s outreach program and her practice of blending the avant-garde with the traditional. According to Shannon Jackson, Addams went even further in practicing “civic playhousekeeping” by advocating theatrical performances, festivals, and games as a means to foster a sense of community among the poor. Addams explained that she believed in the communicative power of play; it performed, she said, “a social function” in encouraging individuals to tap their emotional resources and form bonds with one another. She elaborated: it is in moments of pleasure, of emotional expansion that men do this most readily. Play, beyond any other human activity, fulfills this function of revelation of character and is there-

148

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

fore most useful in modern cities which are full of devices for keeping men apart and holding them ignorant of each other.54

Addams’s philosophy brought the practice of collecting-as-play out of the home and into the public domain. She invited others to join her in losing their “sense of isolation” by becoming absorbed in cultural activities that encouraged “moments of pleasure” and “emotional expansion.” Anticipating object-relations theorists, she understood that playing, especially shared playing, stimulated creativity and led to the healthy development of the personality.55 Dreier’s desire to provide art exhibitions that enhanced the lives of ordinary people is another manifestation of this “civic play-housekeeping.” She hoped to provide a permanent opportunity for a neglected segment of the public to see art by bequeathing her home in Connecticut as a “country museum.” She outlined her reasons in 1939: As far as I know there has never been a—Country Museum—combining Art in the home and garden—showing people that Art is and must be a part of everyday life, if it is to exert any influence on us. It must be brought into the lives of our rural community, who can come and see art at leisure under surroundings which they know and without undue exertion.56

Dreier’s goal was to demystify the avant-garde and make it more accessible by mingling it with the familiar objects of the home, which would diminish the “exertion” demanded by the intimidating spaces of museums. Unable to fund her project, Dreier gave most of her collection, as well as that of the Société Anonyme, to Yale University in 1941, followed by smaller gifts and bequests to several museums. Her collection included the work of twenty-seven women artists, many of whom she included in the 1934 exhibition she staged for the American Women’s Association, From Impressionism to Abstraction. In this, as in the other exhibitions Dreier organized, she avoided the historical and categorical groupings favored by the male planners of the Armory Show and the curators at the Museum of Modern Art.57 Dreier’s commitment to the gendering of modernism can be read in the emphasis she placed on the home as the locus of values, as well as her support of women artists and feminist causes. But she also demonstrated the focus and ambition typical of male collectors in her single-minded promotion of aesthetic modernism, and she frequently deferred to Duchamp’s judgment and championed a host of other male modernists. Rather than a matter of acquiescence, though, Dreier’s behavior should be viewed in relation to her philosophical beliefs. As a devotee of Theosophy, she was influenced by its emphasis on the irrelevance of gender. Theosophists maintained that there was an essential similarity between men and women based on the principles of karma and reincarnation, which “promised women an escape from gender.”58 The psychologist Hilary Lips suggests that androgyny can be achieved by individuals who view femininity and masculinity as two

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

149

57. Study, Louise and Walter Arensberg residence, Hollywood, California, photographed by Fred R. Dapprich, c. 1945. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Archives.

complementary halves that are both needed to complete the whole.59 Dreier appears to have aspired to achieve this balance. Gender, as Michael Kimmel maintains, “is a process—negotiated, contested, interactive.”60 This process was also enacted by male modernists, including the other major collector in Duchamp’s circle, Walter Arensberg. Although Arensberg’s interest in art collecting was less socially and spiritually motivated than Dreier’s, he demonstrated a gendered sensibility that combined the emotional with the intellectual. A newspaper reporter turned poet, Arensberg devoted much of his life trying to prove that Francis Bacon authored Shakespeare’s works.61 His interest in cryptography led him to appreciate the complexity in Duchamp’s oeuvre. This proclivity for hierarchical systems also drove his aesthetic assumption that the fine arts were superior to the decorative arts. A photograph of the study in his Hollywood home reveals that he banished the Victorian clutter that Dreier favored and did not tra‹c in domestic categories of art (fig. 57). There is nothing to distract the eye from feasting on the paintings by Duchamp, Robert Delaunay, Pablo Picasso, Francis Picabia, and Salvador Dalí or the two marble sculptures by Constantin Brancusi on the table. But that does not mean that Arensberg viewed the art he owned with the objectivity of a connoisseur. On the contrary, he was deeply emotional about his collection. The curator and art dealer Katharine Kuh, whom he hired to catalogue his artworks, re-

150

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

marked on the passion he invested in them. Much to her dismay, he decided against bequeathing his collection to the Art Institute of Chicago because she had not installed a loan exhibition of his works exactly as it appeared in his home.62 Like so many women collectors, Arensberg experienced a symbiotic relationship with the art he possessed: he perceived his collection as an embodiment of himself and could not countenance displaying it in any way that failed to reflect him. Arensberg was not the only male devotee of modern art whose emotions inflected his appreciation of it. The Chicago collector Arthur Jerome Eddy, who was stimulated to write about art after he purchased twenty-five paintings at the Armory Show, described the ideal critic as “he who tries to feel and understand how the form expresses the inner feeling of the artist.”63 He accordingly attempted to subdue his critical faculties and empathize with artworks when looking at them. As a lawyer, Eddy also introduced a degree of gendering into his professional life, countering the hard-driving masculinist model of legal practice with the advice that “cooperation, not competition was the new order of things.”64 Willing to embrace attitudes that were traditionally earmarked as feminine, Eddy achieved a gendered outlook in both his public and private lives. This state of equilibrium was sometimes achieved by couples who did not rigidly adhere to conventional gender roles. Maud and Chester Dale collected as a team: she provided the erudition and he supplied the money and negotiating savoir-faire. Together, they amassed a major group of Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and modernist paintings, over two hundred of which are now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. Impressed by the visual expertise that his wife had acquired as an art student in New York and Paris before their marriage in 1911, Chester admitted that they “collected because Maud had the knowledge and he had the acquisitiveness.”65 Nonetheless, he displayed a gendered sensibility in his sentimental attachment to art. Despite his reputation as a ruthless trader in the art market, Chester formed a psychological bond with the objects in their collection, referring to them as his “children” and claiming to communicate with them on a daily basis.66 Nor did Maud conform to the stereotype of the trophy wife. In addition to curating seven exhibitions at the French Institute’s Museum of French Art, she organized six further shows at the Wildenstein and Durand-Ruel galleries to benefit the French Hospital of New York. She wrote the catalogues for these shows, published art criticism, and in 1930 authored a book about Picasso, following a standard chronological approach. Contrary to her husband’s emotional response to art, she questioned the reliability of the senses, cautioning that “man’s reaction to the evidence of his senses once led him to believe the world was flat.”67 Defying traditional stereotypes, the Dales balanced his aªective attachment to art with her objectivity. The sociologist Grant McCracken contends that collecting can bond couples “in a gendered activity in which both can seek their specializations within the division of labor.”68 While this observation holds true for the Dales to the extent that Maud functioned as the art expert and scholar and Chester as the negotiator and investor, they exchanged roles in their gendered response to art.

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

151

The a‹nity between self and object sometimes produced stress in marital relations among couples whose tastes and outlooks diªered. Wed at nineteen to the only son of America’s richest man in the Progressive Era and going on to become the mother of six children, Abby Rockefeller turned to modern art as a means to assert herself. According to her granddaughter Laura Chasin, Rockefeller “wives were supposed to give up certain things, take on certain things and not want certain things.”69 Rockefeller circumvented these stultifying standards by carving out an independent identity through her collection and patronage of the avant-garde. Her husband, John Rockefeller Jr., objected to her enthusiasm for modern art, which he dismissed because of its “desire for self-expression, as if the artist were saying, ‘I’m free, bound by no form, and art is what flows out of me.’”70 A strict Baptist, he was reared in the Puritan tradition of self-discipline and consequently found his wife’s attraction to the violent, distorted canvases of the German Expressionists and other modernists disturbing. John Rockefeller Jr. paid a stiª price for his repressed behavior. He suªered several bouts of neurasthenia with symptoms of mental exhaustion and anxiety. Because of the taint of eªeminacy associated with these complaints, a common remedy focused on activities associated with virility. Rockefeller’s treatment of choice, like Theodore Roosevelt’s, was to reassert his manhood through physical action— in his case, chopping wood and burning brush.71 He also discovered a release in planning the Rockefeller clan’s country house, Kykuit, in Pocantico Hills, New York, and in contemplating the old master paintings and decorative arts he collected for his townhouse in the city, including meticulously crafted Chinese vases and sculpture, Japanese prints, Persian miniatures, medieval tapestries, and panels by the Italian Primitives. It was unlikely, however, that he consciously admitted to their therapeutic eªect. By the first decades of the twentieth century, male malaise had become so endemic among businessmen that many designers and artists, in opposition to modernist reformers, continued to recommend that the home be furnished as a retreat. The Arts and Crafts architect M. H. Baillie Scott, in 1906, advocated that a restful, decorative element be incorporated into the art and furnishings of the home: If we imagine, for instance, the tired man of business returning to his suburban home in the evening, it can hardly be supposed that he will be prepared to make the special mental eªort involved in an inspection of his pictures; but whatever decorative quality they express in conjunction with their surroundings will at once enfold him as in an atmosphere which soothes and charms like harmonious music.72

This gendered acceptance of the feminine metaphor of organic interconnectedness riled modernist critics, who feared such self-absorption would sap men’s energy and lead to complacency. Realizing that her husband’s psyche required soothing, Abby Rockefeller tried to bridge the aesthetic gap by introducing him to more restful forms of abstraction. Thinking that

152

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

the serene, decorative canvases of Henri Matisse might be more in accord with her husband’s sensibilities, Abby sat the two men next to each other at a dinner she hosted in 1930. It was a shrewd move, because Matisse was particularly sensitive to the strain on the nervous systems of urban businessmen and designed his rhythmic compositions with the intention of oªering them some relief from the maladie du siècle. In his “Notes of a Painter” (1908), he explained: What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity, devoid of troubling or depressing subject matter, an art that could be for every mental worker, for the businessman as well as the man of letters, for example, a soothing, calming influence on the mind, something like a good armchair that provides relaxation from physical fatigue.73

Thus Matisse was predisposed to be sympathetic to John Rockefeller’s needs. At the dinner he made every eªort to explain his philosophy to him and even drew a parallel between his own art and the colors and patterns in the tycoon’s exquisite Chinese porcelains and Persian Polonaise rugs, arguing that they shared a similar aesthetic foundation. Frank Crowninshield, the editor of Vanity Fair, who was present at the dinner and overheard Rockefeller’s response, reported: But the philanthropist who had listened very politely, regretted quite as politely, and in the most polished French, that he must still appear adamant. Then, with an engaging burst of confidence, he added that Mr. Matisse must not altogether despair, because, though he might still seem to be stone, he suspected that Mrs. Rockefeller, thanks to her very special gifts of persuasion, would eventually wear him down to the consistency of jelly.74

That quivering state of capitulation never came to pass. John remained so averse to modern art of all persuasions that he refused to allow Abby to display her collection in the main rooms of their home. The drawing room (fig. 58) is an expression of his taste, not hers: the intricate oriental rug, tapestried chairs, and Chinese porcelain vases are all objects he sought out and treasured. John was particularly attached to these vases and even designed their bases himself. He confessed: “I have found in their study a great recreation and diversion, and I have become very fond of them.”75 He lovingly integrated these decorative items into their home, creating a textural synthesis that resembles Gilded Age female interiors. Because he did not want this delicate harmony disrupted by the chromatic cacophony of his wife’s modern canvases, he relegated them to the seventh floor of their townhouse. Banished but undefeated, Abby Rockefeller transformed the gallery she named “Topside” into an expressive self-portrait, painting herself into the picture so completely that it is impossible to separate her personality from the avant-garde space she created. Its former use as a children’s playroom—a place of storytelling—must have made it easier for her to turn each of the three rooms into a chapter that narrated aspects of the indi-

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

153

58. Second-floor drawing room, Abigail and John Rockefeller Jr. residence, New York, n.d. Photo: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. 59. Print room, Top-side Gallery, Abigail and John Rockefeller Jr. residence, New York, 1929–31. Photo: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

60. Large gallery, Top-side Gallery, Abigail and John Rockefeller Jr. residence, New York, 1929–31. Photo: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

viduality she had to suppress on the floors below. The print room (fig. 59), with its Bakelite permaplastic walls and aluminum-strip display panels, represented her ultra-modern self; the ceramics room, the tactile side of her nature; and the large gallery (fig. 60), with its mixture of folk and abstract art, the spontaneous and nonconformist sides of her character. The pièce de résistance was her private bathroom, which borrowed mirrors and wavy glass from the magician’s bag of tricks to create an illusion of a dreamy underwater world. Working in collaboration with Donald Deskey, the Art Deco designer who would go on to design the interiors of the Rockefeller Center, Rockefeller transformed her children’s playroom into an adult play space where she could escape her husband’s censure and release her creative imagination. Collecting as a form of play was just as significant in the private lives of the women of the Progressive Era as it had been in the Gilded Age. The freedom it guaranteed had not diminished over the intervening decades, despite the advances in women’s rights. On an individual level, thwarted wives like Rockefeller still craved an outlet for their frustrations and a stimulus for daydreaming about a more perfect world. In writing about the relationship between play and collecting, the sociologists Brenda Danet and Tamar Katriel contend that art collecting “is a form of private leisure, outside the bounds of role

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

155

obligations and the serious business of everyday life, in which the individual is free to develop an idiosyncratic symbolic world.”76 Explaining the beneficial eªect of that sphere, psychiatrist Susan Deri notes that a good “playspace” is hospitable, adding: “peace comes from the creative inner space that is the base for the symbolic function that bridges over the gaps of time and space, thus uniting what has been separated.”77 Rockefeller, the wellbehaved wife, could search for wholeness in this safe space of her own invention by indulging in the self-expression so dreaded by her husband. His reaction to her private retreat was both condescending and wistful. He wrote to her in 1931 after “Top-side” was completed, saying: “I can imagine how much you are enjoying playing with your picture gallery again and only wish I could really share with you sincerely the interest which you take in it.”78 One can hardly claim that the Rockefellers’ marriage involved a reversal of roles, given that John relished his paternal position as head of the family and kept a close watch on Abby’s spending. But under this veneer of conventionality, a gendering of sensibilities took place, as John looked to the domestic, decorative arts for comfort and Abby, psychologically the hardier of the pair, promoted contemporary art forms that were designated “masculine.” Although their tastes seemed so antithetical that to outsiders the pair resembled contrasting hues on a color wheel, they made an eªort to accommodate each other. Abby cultivated an interest in the eighteenth-century porcelain that her husband loved, and even the old masters, although her modernist sensibility led her to prefer the simplified compositions of the thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italian Primitive painters. While John instinctively responded to the graceful designs of the eighteenth century, he needed some persuasion to appreciate the ascetic compositions of the early Italians, but he eventually relented.79 He expressed his characteristic “granite indiªerence,” however, to Abby’s attempts to win him over to the new art she most admired. Why was Abby Rockefeller so committed to the avant-garde? Clearly it presented her with an escape from her controlling husband and a venue in which she could define her identity in distinction to his. Beyond these reasons, she harbored another, more profound motivation, which she confessed to her son Nelson, confiding that art “is one of the greatest resources of my life. . . . it enriches the spiritual life and makes one more sane and sympathetic, more observant and understanding, as well as being good for one’s nerves.”80 Rockefeller’s explanation adds a meditative dimension to the purpose of her renovated playroom and also accounts for the proselytizing zeal with which she set out to convert her fellow New Yorkers by spearheading the founding of the Museum of Modern Art. Kathleen McCarthy oªers further insights into the appeal of the modern to American women. She suggests that because it was less sought after by wealthy connoisseurs and museums, it was more aªordable.81 Furthermore, the women of the Progressive Era who had begun to enjoy more independence could claim a measure of cultural authority and become producers rather than simply consumers of culture by supporting living artists. Arthur B. Davies recognized this inclination when he solicited money for the Armory

156

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

Show from women whom he knew to be sympathetic to the modernist cause. In addition to Abby Rockefeller, these patrons included Lillie Bliss, with whom Rockefeller would co-found the Museum of Modern Art; Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, who would create her own museum; and Mabel Dodge, for whom it presented a heaven-sent opportunity to establish herself as an avant-garde maven.82 In defiance of the conservative taste of their social class, these women resolved to make modern art a permanent feature in the lives of New Yorkers. Abby Rockefeller recounted how she was persuaded to take this giant step in a lengthy letter to A. Conger Goodyear, whom she handpicked as the Museum of Modern Art’s first president: I began to think of women whom I knew in New York City, who cared deeply for beauty and who bought pictures, women who would be willing, and had faith enough, to help start a museum of contemporary art. Miss Lizzie Bliss and Mrs. Cornelius Sullivan were outstanding in this group; I asked them to lunch with me and laid the matter before them. I suggested that we form ourselves into a committee of three and that we find a man to be president of the museum that was to be. We met again and after much thought decided that we would invite you to meet with us and discuss the possibility of your being president. We did this because we had been told of your eªorts in the cause of modern art in Buªalo and that you had resigned the presidency of that museum because the trustees would not go along with you in your desire to show the best things in modern art.83

Out of deference to her husband’s dislike of a project he dismissed as “Abby’s folly,” combined with her own ladylike aversion to publicity, Rockefeller opted to work in Goodyear’s shadow and serve in the more discreet role of treasurer of the new museum. Rockefeller’s biographer speculates that she and her female co-founders “assumed that the museum establishment would not rally behind a woman in an experiment of such magnitude.”84 There is no question, though, that Rockefeller, Bliss, and Sullivan were responsible for launching the museum. Working together, they embodied the spirit of sisterhood that characterizes the female promoters of modernism in the Progressive Era. The three women were a mismatched trio, yet each brought a special skill to the table. Rockefeller drew on her leadership experiences in a number of progressive female causes, including a residential home for working women, the Grace Dodge Hotel in Washington, DC, named for the Young Woman’s Christian Association and women’s rights activist. Like Phoebe Hearst, Rockefeller was concerned about the vulnerability of single women in crowded cities, noting that “increasing numbers of young women go into factories, shops or o‹ces,” but could not aªord decent accommodation on the salaries they earned.85 Her philanthropies extended to the Harlem Sewing Room, Art Workers Club for Women, League of Women Voters, and Margaret Sanger’s Birth Control Clinic. As worthwhile as these projects were, none of them consumed as much of her time, energy, and money as the founding of the Museum of Modern Art.

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

157

Bliss had a proven track record in supporting avant-garde causes, which made her a wise choice as vice president of the new museum. Like Rockefeller, she endured family prejudice toward her taste in modern art, which only made her more determined to endorse it. Unmarried, she lived with her parents, who relegated her collection to the basement of their Manhattan townhouse, only allowing one piece to be brought up at a time for temporary viewing. This bias strengthened Bliss’s resolve to promote new talent and fresh forms. She actively assisted Davies in the organization of the Armory Show, where she purchased works by Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, and Odilon Redon, whose Symbolist subjects corresponded with the evocative figural compositions of Davies in her collection.86 Bliss’s unflaggingly rebellious spirit was a constant source of encouragement to the other founders of the museum. She had honed her promotional skills in musical circles, where, beginning in the first decade of the twentieth century, she studied piano with the Kneisel Quartet and ardently supported their experimental compositions. As with contemporary visual art, avant-garde music, according to musicologist Carol Oja, succeeded because “at its core were women.”87 Monroe Wheeler, director of exhibitions and publications at the Museum of Modern Art, recalled asking Bliss how she had come to appreciate such “outlandish pictures”: “She answered me in two words—‘modern music.’”88 Recognized as “one of the really great music patrons in America,” Bliss earned a similar accolade in the art world when she bequeathed her outstanding collection of Cézannes, Picassos, and Matisses to the museum.89 Not as wealthy as either Bliss or Rockefeller, Mary Quinn Sullivan contributed a practical form of cultural capital to the planning of the Museum of Modern Art. Born in Indianapolis, the daughter of a firefighter, she won a scholarship to the Pratt Institute in 1899 and then taught art in Queens. The New York Board of Education sent her abroad to study art schools in Germany, Belgium, England, Italy, and France, where she made her first modest art purchases. In 1907 Quinn moved in with the Dreier family in Brooklyn Heights and traveled to Europe with Katherine Dreier. The two women discovered that although they shared a mutual passion for modern art, Dreier was drawn to abstract compositions and Sullivan to the semirecognizable forms of Post-Impressionism and Fauvism. Returning to England, Quinn studied at the Slade School of Art, where she was impressed by Roger Fry’s instruction and the Post-Impressionist exhibition he curated in 1910. She returned to New York in time to contribute her support to the Armory Show, along with Rockefeller and Bliss.90 She then resumed her career as an art educator by joining the faculty of the Pratt Institute’s School of Household Science and Arts and later taught at the Cooper Union. Although her taste was less avant-garde than Dreier’s, they shared a commitment to integrating aªordable art into the daily life of the home. Quinn published a textbook, Planning and Furnishing the Home: Practical and Economical Suggestions for the Homemaker (1914), in which she contended that “an expensively furnished house is necessarily no more beautiful than an inexpensively and simply furnished one.” 91 She stressed the importance of harmony, balance, unity, form, lighting, and integrity of materials—the same principles that were evident in the modern paintings she had ad-

158

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

mired at the Armory Show. In 1917, at the age of forty, having experienced the professional satisfaction of a New Woman, Quinn married Cornelius Sullivan, a lawyer and collector. Together, they actively collected works by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Georges Rouault, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Georges Braque, and Amedeo Modigliani, as well as early paintings by Flemish, French, and American artists. They also made purchases at the 1927 sale of her husband’s college friend John Quinn, who disappointed advocates of modernism when he cantankerously declared that he did not want his collection to “be consigned to the cold tomb of a museum and subjected to the stupid glance of the careless passer-by.”92 The public’s loss of that extraordinary collection of modern art spurred Rockefeller, Bliss, and Sullivan to take action in founding a modern museum as a permanent repository for future collections. After enlisting Goodyear to serve as president of the fledgling organization, the founders invited three more individuals to join their committee: Frank Crowninshield, a collector of modern and African art (and, as mentioned earlier, the editor of Vanity Fair); Paul Sachs, a professor of art history at Harvard; and Josephine Boardman Crane, a philanthropist and salonnière. Crane’s contribution to the museum tends to be overlooked, yet she added an interdisciplinary and international dimension to Rockefeller’s organizational skills, Bliss’s experience in avant-garde patronage, and Sullivan’s knowledge of design. Crane was the wealthy widow of Winthrop Murray Crane, a former U.S. senator and governor of Massachusetts. Dedicated to the notion of progressive education, Crane invited Helen Parkhurst to operate a school for children in Dalton, Massachusetts, a precursor to New York’s renowned Dalton School, which Crane also funded.93 Following the death of her husband in 1920, she moved to New York, where her close friend Abby Rockefeller invited her to participate in the founding of the museum. Although Crane was not a major collector of modern art, she was committed to cultural causes. Russell Lynes, in his history of the Museum of Modern Art, observes that “her good will toward the arts was surely genuine, and she was most certainly in a position to contribute handsomely to the coªers of the Museum, which, indeed, she did over a great many years.”94 Crane was celebrated for the Thursday evening salon she held in her apartment overlooking Central Park. Her guests included Edith Sitwell, Isak Dinesen, Somerset Maugham, T. S. Eliot, Sir Kenneth Clark, and Aldous Huxley. She selected themes for these gatherings, as in the winter of 1944, when her topic was “modern science of character and its roots in the past.”95 The novelist Cecil Roberts was a regular guest at Crane’s soirees and approvingly noted that “the evanescent art, so well practiced in French salons of the eighteenth-century,” was alive and well there.96 Her thirst for knowledge also motivated her to stage Monday afternoon classes for women, who listened to speakers ranging from art historian Edgar Wind to feminist psychologist Karen Horney. Many women, like Crane, who were not involved in the professions nonetheless had a high regard for the achievement of others. Attuned to the Progressive Era’s emphasis on educational advancement, she enthusiastically added the Museum of Modern Art to her portfolio of causes. The characterization of modernists as defiant rebels fails to fit the women who were

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

159

61. Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, opening exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 7–December 7, 1929. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

instrumental in the founding of the Museum of Modern Art, whose mission was reformist, not revolutionary. They saw a need that had not been met by the men who dominated the cultural hierarchy and went about rectifying it. Reflecting on the quicker response of American women to novel forms of art, Meyer Schapiro mused: “Art as a realm of finesse above the crudities of power appealed to the imaginative, idealistic wives and daughters of magnates occupied with their personal fortunes.”97 These women may have been infected by their sisters’ struggle for emancipation, but they did not adopt their radical tactics. They were as eager to cooperate with the men they invited to join them in their adventurous enterprise as they had been during the Armory Show. This time, however, because they played an executive role, tensions inevitably simmered beneath the surface. The organizational structure of the incipient museum became more complex after the founding committee formalized itself as a board of trustees and expanded its membership to include collectors Stephen Clark, Sam Lewisohn, Chester Dale, and Duncan Phillips. Realizing the need for a professional to oversee the day-to-day operations of the museum, Abby Rockefeller interviewed Alfred Barr Jr., a young art historian who was teaching at Wellesley College while writing his dissertation on the role of the machine in modern art. Impressed by his “youth, enthusiasm and knowledge,” she recommended

160

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

that he be hired as director.98 Rockefeller and her fellow co-founders closely monitored his activities, however. Displeased with the suggestion proposed by Barr and a few trustees that the museum’s inaugural exhibition should feature established American artists, Rockefeller responded: “It would seem to me a little bit flat to start with a purely American exhibition of older men.” She and her cohorts agitated for an exhibition of the French forebears of modernism and refused to compromise. Crowninshield telegrammed the capitulation of Barr and the trustees: “Sachs Barr and I wanted small show Ryder Homer Eakins last two weeks October followed by Seurat Van Gogh Cezanne in November but four ladies on committee solidly against us. . . . Barr Sachs and I willing to join the adamantine ladies.”99 Having spent years observing her husband’s “granite” indiªerence, Rockefeller apparently passed on the lesson she had learned from him to her “adamantine” colleagues. Their instinct proved correct when the public flocked to the museum’s inaugural exhibition. The fashion publicist Eleanor Lambert commented: “People forget the enormous power and influence women exercised then. The museum opened 10 days after the stock market crash and 49,000 people visited it over five weeks. The founders had touched a public nerve.”100 While the battle over the content of the new museum’s first exhibition has been chronicled by historians, the founders’ influence on the presentation of the exhibition has not been explored. Sullivan’s position as chair of the furnishing committee favorably situated her to have an eªect on the museum’s method of displaying art. She believed in stylistic simplicity, advocating in Planning and Furnishing the Home: “Only one or two very good pictures at the most should be hung on one wall-space. They should be hung at a reasonable eyelevel.”101 That this scheme was adopted is evident in a photograph of the opening exhibition (fig. 61). In contrast to the crowded, multilayered scheme favored by the Hewitts at the Museum for the Arts of Decoration, paintings are spaciously set apart in single rows, the sparseness recalling Sullivan’s recommended design for an entryway in Planning and Furnishing the Home (fig. 62), which also incorporated lightcolored walls, straightforward geometric lines, and a minimum of distracting detail. Although 62. View of entryway, from Mary J. Quinn [Sullivan], Planning and Furnishing the Home (New York: Harper, 1914), facing p. 128.

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

161

63. Living room, Lillie Bliss residence, New York, c. 1931. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

there is no documentation to indicate that Sullivan was directly responsible for the design of the inaugural exhibition, its appearance accords with the philosophy of display she had published fourteen years earlier, and as head of the furnishing committee, it stands to reason that she would have played a role in shaping the installation. Unlike Rockefeller, Bliss, and Crane, who preferred the curved shapes and soft upholstery of the Moderne style in their interiors, Sullivan favored clean lines and an uncluttered look. Joining the growing number of women whose lives were becoming more public and professional, she rejected the emotion-laden tie to the decorative arts in favor of a less psychologically charged atmosphere. Sullivan trenchantly disparaged the bibelots cherished by housebound women: “Bric-a-Brac! What sins are committed in your name! The housekeeper must not allow her sentiment . . . to clutter up mantels, tables, and shelves with useless articles.”102 What had comforted and served women so well in the years leading up to women’s enfranchisement and entry into the professions now seemed freighted with associations of the oppressive past. Rockefeller, however, preferred to live in comfort, despite her commitment to the modern visual arts. When she was on the verge of furnishing “Top-side,” she explained:

162

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

64. Gallery, Lillie Bliss residence, New York, c. 1931. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

I am very reluctant to buy what is entirely known as modern furniture for it; I have seen so little that I really like. I am now thinking of putting simple comfortable chairs and sofas in it and perhaps nice old tables and not attempting anything in the way of modern furniture. . . . Very confidentially I feel that Miss Bliss’ gallery, which has lots of lovely pictures, is also full of small elephants in the way of furniture. It all looks so big and clumsy to me.103

In a photograph of the living room in the Park Avenue penthouse Bliss bought after the deaths of her parents (fig. 63), a landscape by Davies and Toulouse-Lautrec’s May Belfort in Pink are overwhelmed by the ornate period furniture in the room. Bliss’s large gallery, deemed “big and clumsy” by Rockefeller, is much more streamlined in appearance than the living room (fig. 64). Like Rockefeller’s, it is furnished with softly contoured Modernestyle sofas and chairs, but it is lighter and more spacious. In fact, the patterning on Rockefeller’s sofa suggests Victorian ornateness and gives the room a less progressive appearance than Bliss’s. Rockefeller’s ambivalent attitude toward the old and the new resembled that of the

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

163

influential interior designer Elsie de Wolfe. On the one hand, de Wolfe wanted to stamp out Victorianism and replace it with “Simplicity, Suitability and Proportion”; yet, on the other, her taste for chintz and eighteenth-century antiques prevented her from going to Sullivan’s extreme in banishing virtually all objets d’art.104 Moreover, Rockefeller, like de Wolfe, viewed interior space as an expression of women’s identity. Rockefeller placed the stamp of her character on her seventh-floor retreat, and de Wolfe declared in her bestselling book The House in Good Taste (1913): “It is the personality of the mistress that the home expresses. Men are forever guests in our homes, no matter how much happiness they may find there.”105 The role of de Wolfe and other doyennes of the domestic interior was soon challenged. Male professionals took issue with the implication that they were superfluous to the design of the home by responding in one of two ways: they either rejected the concept of the home as a refuge, as did Julius Meier-Graefe and Wyndham Lewis, or they attempted to gain control and establish themselves as spokesmen for a male version of domesticity. Frank Alvah Parsons, the founder of the Parsons School of Design, countered de Wolfe’s claim to female proprietorship of the home and the legacy of interior decoration she had inherited from Candace Wheeler and the other women who had preceded her in the profession.106 In an advice manual of his own, Interior Decoration: Its Principles and Practice (1915), Parsons boldly asserted: “The house is but the externalized man; himself expressed in colour, form, line and texture. . . . It is he.”107 Whereas de Wolfe’s focus was on personality and self-expression, Parsons’s was on function and appropriate usage. Having crossed gender lines when he became professionally involved in interior decoration, he attempted to inject the field with the stereotypically masculine predilection for measurement, ratio, and proportion. It was this functional approach to interior space and its contents that Alfred Barr adopted at the Museum of Modern Art. This allegiance goes a long way in explaining why it was Barr and not the women members of the board of trustees who insisted that the museum maintain a link with everyday life. In applying for a charter from the regents of the University of the State of New York, he defined the purpose of the new museum as “establishing and maintaining in the City of New York a museum of modern art, encouraging and developing the study of modern arts and the application of such arts to manufacture and practical life and furnishing popular instruction.”108 Over the initial objections of the trustees, Barr insisted that the goal of applying art to “manufacture and practical life” be included in this statement. Although this caveat resembles the feminine principle of integrating art with daily experience underlying the Museum for the Arts of Decoration, Barr’s gender-biased mission undermined that ideal by wresting control of the quotidian from women and championing machine designs over handcrafted objects. In the process of researching his dissertation on the machine and modern art, Barr was converted to the antidomestic ideas of architects such as Adolf Loos, who considered ornament a crime, and Le Corbusier, who virulently attacked the cult of the home and its “intoxicating decoration.” The French architect resorted to the metaphor of disease to ac-

164

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

65. Willi Baumeister, Wie Wohnen? Die Wohnung: Werkbund Ausstellung (How to Live? The Dwelling: Werkbund Exhibition), 1927, color lithograph, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild Kunst, Bonn. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

cuse domestic architects of ruining the health of male home dwellers, whom he promised would be better served by a stripped-down “machine for living.” In his book The Decorative Art of Today (1925), Le Corbusier declared that decoration was “dead” and asserted the superiority of the male ensemblier over the female home decorator. His goal was to rationalize interior space and expunge all feminine traces from it: “The exponents of the decorative ensemble wished to show, in making their name and establishing their profession, that male abilities were indispensable in this field: considerations of ensemble, organization, sense of unity, balance, proportion, harmony.”109 These ideas formed the thesis of Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, shown at the Museum of Modern Art in 1932. The exhibition was curated by Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, whom Barr had appointed head of the new department of architecture that year. The show’s catalogue echoed the International Style ideas of Loos and Le Corbusier, dramatically encoded five years earlier by Willi Baumeister in a poster for a Deutscher Werkbund exhibition in Stuttgart (fig. 65), a copy of which Johnson donated to the museum. Condemning comfortable domesticity, Baumeister slashed a red

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

165

X across a photograph of a feminine Victorian interior. The misogynist message could not be more clear: women’s taste had to be destroyed. Hitchcock and Johnson further spelled out the new agenda based on “the avoidance of applied decoration” in The International Style, a book they co-authored that year, and cautioned against an American “excessive sentimentality about the ‘homes’ of the past.”110 Johnson drove home this point the following year in the exhibition Objects 1900 and Today, in which he contrasted the decorative objects traditionally favored by women with mass-produced items that he deemed more functional. He pontificated: “Ornamental objets d’art are avoided in modern interior architectural schemes.”111 To buttress his decree, Johnson fell back on a gender hierarchy that privileged the emotionally detached male spectator over the female participant who projected feelings onto the object. By claiming the preeminence of architecture and evicting the decorative, Johnson, under the aegis of Barr, removed the use value of objects from the personal realm of psychological comfort and relocated it to the impersonal domain of function. The transitional objects that had been so closely associated with women’s identity formation were declared anathema in the modern home. Paradoxically, the European concept of functionalism that Barr and Johnson imported had been developed to promote a socialist egalitarianism by eliminating all signs of individualism and eªacing the imprint of individual talent. Although Johnson and Barr shared women’s resistance to commodity fetishism, they nevertheless elevated the aesthetic properties of the objects they displayed over their use as aªordable commodities. When they coated functional objects with the patina of “art,” they took them out of the everyday marketplace. Moreover, their machine-age insistence on the aesthetics of form-as-function foreclosed the domestic consumerism of individuals who invested objects with meaning. Dismayed by the depersonalized aesthetic that was on view at the Museum of Modern Art in 1933, the artist and collector Aline Meyer Liebman (Agnes Meyer’s sister-inlaw), who served on the museum’s membership committee, wrote to Goodyear asking that the museum add a department of decorative arts. She reasoned: It seems to me that the term “Art” should include not only sculpture and painting, the graphic arts and photography—but also could be applied to articles for use and decoration in our daily life such as glass, ceramics, bookbindings and some home-furnishings. . . . you would enrich the spiritual life of the people by the objects themselves. . . . Beautiful and useful articles for the home are always in demand and although we are living in a machine age, there will always be a need for expression in some form on the part of the creative artist.112

Barr put that notion to rest in 1934 with the exhibition Machine Art, which pointedly rejected hand-forged objects that invited the caressive touches associated with women’s empathetic response to art. Commenting on this aversion to all things associated with the female private sphere, Christopher Reed astutely concludes: “The domestic, perpetually invoked in order to be denied, remains throughout the course of modernism a cru-

166

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

cial site of anxiety and subversion.”113 That sense of anxiety in the curatorial o‹ces of the Museum of Modern Art was exacerbated by the dominant presence of the leader of the “adamantine ladies” on the board of trustees. Rockefeller was left alone to monitor the museum’s artistic direction after Bliss died in 1931 and Sullivan resigned her trusteeship, due to the death of her husband, that same year. Since Crane’s focus was on educational outreach, Rockefeller was the sole guardian of aesthetics among the original female founders of the museum. Increasingly disturbed by Barr’s vision, her dissatisfaction culminated with the exhibition Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, which he curated in 1937. In the catalogue, Barr wrote that Dada and Surrealism had “primarily a psychological interest—bizarre, dreamlike, absurd, uncanny, enigmatic”— in other words, a parody of the guileless qualities that had brought Rockefeller so much satisfaction in her private playroom-cum-gallery.114 Dismayed, she consulted with Goodyear, and it was at this point that the decision was made to commission the infamous Packard report on the future direction of the museum. The report would seal Rockefeller’s fate. I have already discussed the devastating implications of Packard’s conclusion that women had an unhealthy influence on American culture. In terms of Barr’s antidomestic conception of modernism, it is evident that Packard not only sided with him—indeed, he quoted him directly in his report—but that he advocated a male coup: We are confronted on every hand with indications that the time has come in America when Art is again taking its proper place among the normal interests of men. Indeed it may be said quite bluntly that no really significant development of contemporary art can take place in this country without the whole-hearted participation of men whose intimate relations with commerce, industry, and productive enterprise of all sorts makes them, rather than women, the immediate instruments for “applying the Arts to practical life.”115

Women awaiting the emergence of a sensitive New Man who veered away from the Victorian paternal model and was unthreatened by the ambitious New Woman would have had their hopes dashed by the Packard report. Even though the art world would seem to be a natural spawning ground for this ideal modern male, it only managed to produce a “liberal version of swagger” to camouflage anxiety about the status of modern masculinity.116 Stunned by the blatant misogyny of the report, Rockefeller retaliated by demoting Barr to “advisory director.” She then resigned from the museum and passed the torch to her son Nelson in 1939.117 She held no illusions about her future role in the museum she had founded. Because the Museum of Modern Art went on to propagate a reductive discourse of aesthetic modernism throughout the twentieth century, its origins in the exquisitely decorated parlors of a small cadre of altruistic women has been largely forgotten. Janet Wolª poignantly observes that “the ascendancy and post-war consolidation of the ‘Museum of Modern Art narrative’ had the eªect of producing an impressive collective amnesia in

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

167

American visual culture.”118 This does not mean that the sisterhood of modernist advocates disbanded following Rockefeller’s abdication. In the years before the “Museum of Modern Art narrative” became entrenched in the art world, women sponsored alternative versions of modernism that vied for recognition with Barr’s masculinist vision and dogmatic pronouncements. Women were instrumental in founding two additional museums of modern art in New York in the 1930s: the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum of American Art. Their planners, Hilla Rebay and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, imported the domestic trappings of private spaces into their galleries, gendering the austere displays prevailing at the Museum of Modern Art and providing a comfortable transition for viewers of contemporary art in public spaces. Both women also challenged the consensual definition of their gender in order to achieve their goals. Rebay’s contribution to New York’s cultural property is less recognized than that of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney or Solomon Guggenheim, whose museums bear their names. Although this aristocratic German painter persuaded Guggenheim to focus on nonobjective works of art and shepherded the creation of the art institution he founded, her decisive role has been overshadowed by the monumentality of his eponymous museum. Born Baroness Hildegard Rebay von Ehrenwiesen in Strasbourg, she studied painting in Paris, where she discovered Eastern mysticism and continued to explore Theosophy, to which she had first been exposed at the age of fourteen by Rudolf Steiner. She also made the acquaintance of the critic and dealer Felix Fénéon, who introduced her to the art of the Post-Impressionists, Fauves, and Italian Futurists. A turning point in Rebay’s conception of art occurred when she met Hans Arp in Zurich in 1916 during the height of the Dada movement and he encouraged her to create nonobjective collages. Arp also recommended her to the director of the avant-garde Berlin gallery Der Stürm, where she exhibited in 1917 and 1919. There she met and became emotionally involved with the nonobjective painter Rudolf Bauer, whom she supported for the remainder of his life. After living in Italy for a year, Rebay decided to immigrate to the United States in 1927. Settling in New York, she was introduced to Irene and Solomon Guggenheim by a family friend shortly after she arrived.119 It was Irene and not Solomon who first expressed interest in Rebay’s art and aesthetic philosophy. Irene Rothschild Guggenheim was widely regarded as a discriminating patron. Her obituary in the New York Herald Tribune described her as “a knowing collector [who] made many important contributions to the city’s art museums.”120 Her taste ranged from the decorative arts to Gothic painting to modern artists such as Georges Seurat, Marc Chagall, and Amedeo Modigliani. After meeting Rebay, she joined a network of female supporters of the artist, including Maud Dale and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. All three purchased collages by Rebay at her one-woman show at the Marie Sterner Gallery in 1927.121 Over the next five years, Irene Guggenheim and Rebay conducted a sprightly correspondence about their mutual interests in artists, dealers, museum exhibitions, music, and interior décor.

168

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

66. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, New York, 1939. Photo: Courtesy of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York. Paintings by Vasily Kandinsky © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

Despite Rebay’s commitment to the European school of nonobjectivity inspired by Vasily Kandinsky, she did not believe that contemporary art should be displayed in the stripped-down environment advocated by Barr and Johnson at the Museum of Modern Art. She advised Irene Guggenheim to arrange the paintings in her suite at the Plaza Hotel against a backdrop of voluminous drapery. The collector dutifully reported that she had followed Rebay’s advice and had informed her decorator accordingly, adding: “I see your point too to have rooms appear like a sitting room as a background.”122 Rebay carried this philosophy over into the museum she founded with Irene’s husband, Solomon.123 Rebay advised Solomon Guggenheim on the purchase of more than seven hundred works of modern art between the years 1929 and 1937, when he initiated plans to establish a museum. Two years later the Museum of Non-Objective Painting opened in a temporary location in a former automobile showroom on East Fifty-fourth Street in Manhattan, with Rebay as its director. Rebay designed the galleries in a manner that was consistent with the advice she had imparted to Irene Guggenheim, by hanging paintings on heavily pleated draperies (fig. 66). The texture of these wall coverings, combined with the soft

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

169

nap of the velvet settees and plush gray carpet, oªset the severity of the nonobjective imagery on display and provided a soothing environment in which the viewer could experience the spiritual uplift provided by the works on display. A contemporary observer described the eªect as “voluptuous,” noting that its ambience was further softened by “enormous tailor-made silver or gold frames on paintings installed only inches from the floor, soft piped music (preferably Bach) plus a faint suggestion of scented air.”124 This feast for the senses was intermittently punctuated by stark white walls, revealing that Rebay was interested in creating a dialogic relationship between femininity and masculinity in the public space of a controversial new museum. Rebay’s gendered balance between female domesticity and the masculine avant-garde resembles the eªect that her friend Katherine Dreier had achieved in the Société Anonyme’s International Exhibition of Modern Art the year before Rebay arrived in America. Both women subscribed to the androgynous tenets of Theosophy and believed that art should transcend gender and achieve a harmony between dialectical forces. This notion also informed Rebay’s concept of nonobjective painting, which she defined in terms of the opposition of material and spiritual forces: Contrary to some people’s contention that the meaning of the word “non-objective” contains a negation, this word seems intensely positive. Its negative aspect concerns the materialistic object, which is outside of the mind; while esoterically spoken, the “non” seems to express the non-tangible, non-visible omnipresence of the creative element, God, and a confirmation of the divine “non” in opposition to matter’s illusion in the object. In fact, this word “non-objective” seems to give protection to everything it concerns. And while the “non” can penetrate the objects, due to its spirituality, no object can penetrate spirituality.125

Rebay described an art form transcending the earthly tug of physical attachments, indicating that her expansive attitude toward gender roles was part and parcel of a broader spiritual philosophy. This perhaps explains her reputed dislike of Guggenheim’s niece Peggy, whose commercial ventures were the antithesis of Rebay’s high-minded goals for art.126 In a lecture she delivered at the Museum of Non-Objective Art in 1944, Rebay emphasized the “cosmic relevance” of the type of art she encouraged, claiming that its goals could best be achieved in the United States, since “America is the center of culture because it is most open to the infinite, exquisite balance of order and creation.”127 Rebay’s admiration for the United States did not extend to its contemporary artists, however. Although she spent several days as Whitney’s guest on Long Island in 1927 and was thus aware of her eªorts toward establishing a museum featuring American realist art, there is no evidence of any collaboration between these two pioneering advocates of modernism.128 While both assailed gender barriers and were committed to transporting the domestic into public spaces, they harbored diªerent views on what constituted modern art. Whitney, like Rebay, was born into an elite family and was trained as an artist, but while Rebay’s aesthetic was shaped by her belief in Theosophy and the radical principles

170

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

of the Parisian and German avant-gardes, Whitney was a product of the genteel ritual of American civic maternalism and the less radical figurative tradition. In her study of voluntary associations, Karen Blair concludes that “clubwomen feared the boldness of abstract art” and “rejected the notion that the work of European white males should monopolize the arts curriculum. Instead, they embraced the cultural contributions of American artists.”129 That is not to say that Rebay, by supporting European abstractionists, was more forward-looking than Whitney. As Rebay indicated in her lecture on nonobjective painting, even Europeans considered America more progressive, and many considered its art the wave of the future. The Armory Show of 1913 had signaled receptivity to the new on this side of the Atlantic, as had Dreier’s and Arensberg’s sponsorship of Duchamp, who famously declared after his arrival in New York in 1915: “The art of Europe is finished” and “America is the country of the art of the future.”130 There was room in this vast country for many diªerent modernisms prior to Barr’s creation of a master narrative at the Museum of Modern Art, ranging from Rebay’s ultra-abstract version to Whitney’s realism. What the two women had in common was an aversion to academic proselytizing, a partiality for nurturing young talent by collecting and displaying contemporary art, and a disregard for social conventions. Nowhere were these ideas greeted with more tolerance than in Greenwich Village, where Whitney had gone to take lessons from the sculptor James Earle Fraser shortly after the turn of the century. By the time she acquired a studio on MacDougal Alley in 1907, Greenwich Village had become a gathering place for bohemians and radicals. She described the neighborhood as “a little space to let all go, all the control of my fenced in life, all the conventionality.”131 Hutchins Hapgood credited women like Whitney with sparking modernism’s rupture with the Victorian past. He declared: “When the world began to change, the restlessness of women was the main cause of the development of Greenwich Village, which existed not only in New York but all over the country.”132 It was there that feminism was historically defined by the Feminist Alliance in 1914 as “a movement which demands the removal of all social, political, economic, and other discriminations which are based upon sex, and the award of all rights and duties in all fields on the basis of individual capacity alone.”133 Whitney subscribed to its reformist ethos in spirit, if not in action: unlike Alva Vanderbilt, her aunt by marriage, she was a New Woman but not a suªragist. She struggled to win recognition for herself and other American artists, supported female homosocial networks, explored diªerent facets of her sexuality, and flaunted her individualism. Uninspired by Rebay’s vision of a transcendent self, Whitney is more indicative of the new attitude toward the individual that emerged in America in the years around 1915. Warren Susman notes that at that time the spiritual and moral “vision of self-sacrifice began to yield to that of self-realization” and the cult of personality, with its emphasis on individual gratification.134 Some of these traits are apparent in the portrait Robert Henri painted of Whitney in 1916 (plate 10). Posed with flushed cheeks and arms akimbo, she generates the barely contained energy of a woman who has reimagined herself as a free spirit. Her bobbed

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

171

hair and apple-green trousers mark her as a defiantly modern woman and signify her rejection of entrenched gender distinctions.135 Whitney wanted to explore both sides of the gender divide, admitting to a youthful lesbian crush and indulging in frequent aªairs with men. Married young, she quickly became disillusioned with her polo-playing husband in particular and the institution of marriage in general: Men are tyrants. They wish to become possessors of the soul of woman as well as her body. . . . She should escape the tyranny of one man. While she belongs to him she is a poor thing indeed, with no object to fulfill but the physical one, with no place in life but the lower one, with no dreams or thoughts to express but the baser ones. . . . She must be untrammeled and free before all her faculties can work.136

Whether or not Whitney was familiar with Elizabeth Cady Stanton’s admonition that marriage created tyrants, threatened individuality, and was “the most subtle form of slavery ever instituted,” she arrived at a similar conclusion.137 Despite her sybaritic pose in Henri’s portrait, Whitney was not content to lay back and luxuriate in her wealth. She expressed her opinion of the useless lifestyle led by her social class in her journal: “I pity, I pity above all that class of people who have no necessity to work. . . . [They are] the great and grand unemployed—the dregs of humanity.”138 Whitney resolved to cultivate her artistic talent and support others who were equally committed to invigorating modern life. Emboldened by her association with the liberated women of Greenwich Village and those who wrote for Arts, the magazine she helped finance, such as Gertrude Stein and Virginia Woolf, Whitney carved out a creative and productive existence for herself independent of her marriage. She dedicated herself to advancing the modernist cause in literature, music, and the visual arts. Less recognized today as a patron of music, Whitney was a major benefactor of Edgard Varèse’s New Symphony Orchestra and brought the compositions of the “ultra-modern” camp of contemporary European composers, including Igor Stravinsky, Erik Satie, and Darius Milhaud, to New York.139 Whitney’s involvement in the visual arts was more woman-oriented. She fostered a female milieu in the exhibition galleries of the Whitney Studio Club, which she opened to the public in 1918 next door to her studio at 8 West Eighth Street. There she featured women artists and attracted female buyers, including her fellow music aficionado Lillie Bliss. Like the Hewitt sisters, Whitney created a gendered environment that was defined and controlled by women, inverting tradition by demoting men to the role of assistants and appointing an indomitable female director, Juliana Force.140 Force’s influence was apparent not only at the Whitney Studio Galleries, but also at the museum Whitney began to plan just two months after the Museum of Modern Art opened in 1929. Force was responsible for the distinctively feminine décor of the last exhibition staged at the Whitney Studio Galleries in 1930, a group show of flower paintings. These she embellished with ornate lattices, pink walls, green floors, and cozy cor-

172

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

67. Installation view, Spring Exhibition—Flowers in Art, Whitney Studio Galleries, New York, March 17–29, 1930. Left to right: Henri Burkhard, Field and Garden Flowers; Niles Spencer, Bedside Table; Max Kuehne, White Roses; Henry Billings, Garden Tools. Lower left: sculpture by William Zorach. Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Library Archives; photographer: Soichi Sunami.

ners furnished with Victorian garden furniture and a profusion of plants (fig. 67).141 Although such overt displays of feminine taste were toned down in the new museum, the residue lingered. Unveiled in 1932, the interiors at the Whitney Museum of American Art, like Rebay’s at the Museum of Non-Objective Art, meshed masculine and feminine elements. The museum’s ambience was even more ostensibly domestic, however, in keeping with Whitney’s aim of creating “rooms instead of galleries.”142 Whitney had included Dorothy Draper on the team of otherwise male interior decorators she had hired, despite her disapproval of socialites who flocked to this rising profession. In her pseudonymous novel Walking the Dusk (1932), she acerbically remarked: “Usually in our crowd when a girl gets hard hit she either takes to dissipation or else a nervous breakdown and goes in for interior decoration as an aftercure.”143 According to the New York Times, the museum’s pasteltoned walls, drapery, and carpets created an elegantly orchestrated interior: The museum diªers from virtually every other such institution in the country. The severity and bleakness which characterize many such institutions have been done away within

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

173

this latest addition to American museums. Instead of the uniform gray or white walls the museum visitor is accustomed to see, he will find here a variety of coloring. The walls of the sculpture gallery are painted powder blue, against which marble and bronze are defined sharply. Two of the picture galleries have white walls and white velvet curtains, but two others have canary yellow walls and blue carpet hangings. Another large gallery has rosecolored walls, carpet, and hangings and furnishings which give it somewhat the eªect of a drawing room.144

In importing the feminine flavor of the domestic interior to the public space of the museum, Whitney and Force preserved the psychological link between women’s explorations of self in the home and their outbound journey into the wider cultural sphere, just as the Hewitt sisters had done in their Museum for the Arts of Decoration in 1897, Katherine Dreier did in her Brooklyn exhibition in 1926, and Hilla Rebay would do in 1939. These eªorts closely parallel the broader struggle for women’s liberation. Gillian Brown contends in her study of domestic individualism that everything that Stanton hoped women would claim for themselves was present in the home: “rights of property, political equality, credit in the marketplace, and recompense in the world of work.”145 In other words, the promise of freedom contained within possessive individualism was only waiting to be tapped by these women museum founders: money and participation in the art market would lead to the ownership of cultural property and a claim to political authority. The broader implications of this gendering of culture go a long way in explaining why the sisterhood of women involved in the formation of museums in this country was widely denigrated. Not all reviews of the Whitney Museum of American Art’s feminized space were as positive as that in the Times. The art critic Forbes Watson recalled that in its early years, Whitney’s museum “was looked down upon by the arrived as romantic.”146 Not only did the building and its collections not conform to the masculinist modernist aesthetic propagated at the Museum of Modern Art, but Whitney, unlike Rockefeller, refused to defer to male experts. Leery about the inroads women were making into the cultural arena, critics seized the opportunity to put them in their place. Just as Rockefeller was the focus of a male coup, Rebay, resented for her assertiveness and her influence on Guggenheim, was dismissed as director of the museum following Guggenheim’s death in 1949.147 The Hewitt sisters, Rockefeller, Whitney, and Rebay have been reduced to bit players in the history of American modernism. Although its tale of fearless cultural warriors has been repeated so often that it has acquired the feeling of worn beads, it does not tell the whole story. Whether this exclusionary modernist myth originated in residual doubts about women’s aesthetic sagacity because of their a‹nity for the decorative, or in the fear of a feminist takeover that was the subtext of the Packard report, or in women’s increasing visibility in the public sphere, it eªectively rewrote the role they played in founding New York’s leading museums of modern art.

174

•

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

Analyzing the gender crisis faced by the New Woman of the Progressive Era, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg concludes that the intrepid female experimenter was transformed into “a sexually freighted metaphor for social disorder and protest”: Her quintessentially American identity, her economic resources, and her social standing permitted her to defy proprieties, pioneer new roles, and still insist upon a rightful place within the genteel world. Repudiating the Cult of True Womanhood in ways her mother—the new bourgeois matron—never could, she threatened men in ways her mother never did.148

To escape this oppressive climate, a number of American women fled to Europe, where they shed the restrictive layers of their upbringing and actively engaged in shaping their own subjectivity.

THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

•

175

FIVE

Y The Sexing of Taste GERTRUDE AND LEO STEIN • MABEL DODGE ETTA AND CLARIBEL CONE • EMILY CRANE CHADBOURNE

G

ERTRUDE AND LEO STEIN were magnets for American women who went abroad to reformulate themselves in the first decades of the twentieth century. They flocked to the Stein siblings’ apartment in Paris to admire their boldly defiant art collection, which clearly conveyed their disregard for social and aesthetic convention. This avant-garde display publicly announced Gertrude Stein’s identification with the concept of male genius at the same time that it allowed her to promote her pivotal role in modernism. Correspondingly, it oªered Leo Stein a forum to pontificate about his emerging aesthetic theory and to pursue the feminine side of his character through his notion of organicity.1 While Gertrude daunted her visitors with an intellectual analysis of experimental painting, Leo assured them that a psychological rapport with objets d’art was not anathema to modernism. If Leo was the sensitive and self-eªacing New Man, Gertrude was the bold and confident New Woman. Her rationalization of the fine arts ran counter to her brother’s emotional dependency on the decorative arts, resulting in a sexing of taste that upended traditional gender categories. Gertrude Stein was an important role model for women who wanted to liberate their sexuality, especially after 1914, when she began to live openly in a lesbian relationship with Alice B. Toklas. Pablo Picasso’s mistress Fernande Olivier observed that Stein played up her mannish persona, describing her as “masculine in her voice, in her whole bearing.”2 She became more confident about her lesbianism after she escaped from the censorious opinion of same-sex love in the United States, where the pernicious influence of education and feminist ideology were blamed for the perceived propensity for homosex-

176

uality among New Women. Propounding a negative view of Sapphism, the sexologist Havelock Ellis incited fearful American males to launch a campaign against the New Woman and to brand all female professionals, reformers, and educators as lesbians.3 Settling in Paris and successfully distancing herself from this Puritan backlash, Stein became a beacon for women who wished to lead culturally productive lives while remaining true to the instincts of their bodies. Etta and Claribel Cone of Baltimore, Emily Crane Chadbourne of Chicago, and Mabel Dodge of Buªalo were inspired by the transgressive display of art in the Steins’ apartment. Leo, who was his sister’s initial mentor in the art world, also played that part in the lives of Gertrude’s acolytes, escorting them to art exhibitions and lecturing them about the merits of the old masters, modern painters, and the decorative arts. The Steins’ assemblage of avant-garde art, combined with their exploration of the parameters of their gender, gave their visitors the confidence to embark on a similarly rebellious voyage of self-discovery. These American travelers were second-generation New Women who, like Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, placed greater emphasis on self-fulfillment and the flamboyant presentation of self than their more bourgeois-bound predecessors.4 Americans viewed Europe as a site rife with the potential to fulfill their fantasies and wildest ambitions, and many single women recognized that art collecting oªered them an imaginative way to freely act out new identities away from home in a foreign setting. After all, women bound to the lush confines of the domestic interior had first begun to expand their spatial maps while dreaming over objects that conjured up new worlds. The gendering of geography that had taken place in the United States as women began to move into public spaces in the middle of the nineteenth century had expanded after the Civil War, when the stabilized political situation and improved economy made international travel more readily accessible.5 A pattern for single women travelers was well enough established by 1878 for Henry James to marvel at “the young American lady” who went to Europe for reasons of culture.6 He went on to feature such women in several novels, notably Daisy Miller (1879) and The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Confident about America’s manifest destiny, power brokers viewed the country’s women as emissaries who would spread word of its greatness. The French litterateur Theresa Blanc was surprised during her visit to America in 1893 by how much confidence men placed in women’s refinement and their ability to represent them in the cultural sphere. She observed that “in the United States woman is everything; while man confines himself to material tasks, trades and makes money, she represents the intellectual and artistic element.”7 Conduct books advocating invisibility to women travelers spoke at crosspurposes to the new generation of women who were designated America’s cultural ambassadors by their prosperous fathers and husbands: visibility was essential to their mission. Rather than refusing to be looked at, they were now endowed with the power of looking. This shift in the power of the gaze from male voyeurism to female scrutiny coincided with the rise of the middle-class woman whose conspicuous consumption ensured domestic prosperity.8 Recognized by the market economy for their contribution to

177

the family’s and country’s a›uence, these women laid claim to possessive individualism’s construction of the self by seeking their share of cultural capital. Europeans marveled at the sight of the uninhibited and confident American woman who was determined to improve herself. The phenomenon of the single woman traveler was a novelty to Frenchmen like the novelist Pierre de Coulevain. Fascinated by these independent spirits, he considered them more liberated and cultivated than their European sisters. He identified three types of American women abroad: those who wanted to advance their social station by associating with the nobility, expatriates who had impeccable social credentials at home and only associated with other Americans, and, finally, “the artistic type.”9 It was this last category, especially the plucky unmarried women who traveled to acquire culture and behaved transgressively by buying avant-garde art, that intrigued the French, because there were no female equivalents in their own country. The women who flocked to the Steins’ salon were fascinated by Gertrude because she had fearlessly discarded the galaxy of values they had been taught to endure at home: traditional marriages, decorous behavior, and conventional gender roles. While her American admirers expressed themselves in the artistic and creative fields and rejected gender conventions, they did not follow Stein in fully embracing the posture of the “mannish lesbian.” Rather, they displayed a range of sexual proclivities, from the heterosexual to the bisexual and femme personas. A few even migrated between sexual orientations and assumed multiple identities. Although Stein represented a forbidden alternative and evoked an extreme fantasy of “what-ifness” by which they could measure themselves, the women in her circle selectively assimilated facets of her personality into their conceptions of themselves and finally settled on modified identities that suited their particular sexual and aesthetic orientation. A similar divergence from Gertrude Stein’s tastes is apparent in the mixture of avantgarde and traditional art these women collected, which more closely aligned with Leo Stein’s expansive viewpoint. Mabel Dodge was swayed by Gertrude’s vanguard philosophy and faithfully publicized it at the groundbreaking Armory Show in 1913, but whereas Stein was indiªerent to the so-called “minor arts,” Dodge considered furnishings and objets d’art important props in communicating her identity. She confessed: “I have always known how to make rooms that had power in them. . . . I do know how to assemble things and make them do their work.”10 Even though both Steins inculcated the Cone sisters into the avant-garde world of painting, the Cones remained partial to Leo’s psychological a‹nity with three-dimensional objects: “For both sisters, it would have been hard to draw the line between art and decoration, so closely were these passions allied in their minds and taste.”11 Emily Chadbourne was another visitor to the Steins’ Parisian apartment who embellished her collection of modern paintings with carefully chosen items of decorative art. Her propensity for unusual things fascinated Lady Ottoline Morrell, who sought her out at the recommendation of the critic and curator Roger Fry, noting that Chadbourne “gathered round her dark and dusky dealers from whom she would buy rare Persian carpets, priceless Persian plates that would be stored in the mysterious, dimly lit and asphyx-

178

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

iating rooms of her flat.”12 In other words, none of Gertrude Stein’s female admirers fully imitated her exclusive devotion to male modernist painting and sculpture, with its concomitant cult of genius. It seems likely, however, that Stein would have been less of a role model for the inhibited American women who visited her had her masculine persona not been toned down by the domesticity of 27 rue de Fleurus, where she held court. This softly gendered ambience had been introduced by Leo, who was the apartment’s first tenant. Unlike the sisterhood of modern museum founders, who shared a philanthropic kinship, the Stein siblings were philosophically at odds with each other. Writers have tended to overlook Leo’s catholic approach to the arts in favor of Gertrude’s more brazenly challenging views. Yet he was the better informed of the siblings, having spent three years studying aesthetic theory and the history of art in Italy, where he was also persuaded to appreciate the innovations of the modern French school through the aegis of his fellow Harvardian Bernard Berenson. When Leo Stein moved into 27 rue de Fleurus in April 1903, he brought with him the furniture and objets d’art that he had collected during his three years in Florence. He noted that he had acquired “cabinets, tables, chairs, iron boxes, bronze mortars, brass lamps, wooden saints, terra cotta saints, satin hangings, Venetian glasses, ivory daggers.” 13 In a photograph of Stein in his studio circa 1905 (fig. 68), many of these small decorative items are visible on his desk and along the top of the credenza behind him. Much more than mere collectibles, objects were important elements in the aesthetic philosophy he had begun to formulate in 1902. In his autobiographical Journey into the Self, he described how he had achieved a breakthrough in perception after forcing himself to study a china plate for four or five weeks: It was, one might say, no longer a composite object, but an organism. Obviously, it was not an organism in itself, but a projection of my own organic sense, and that organization was experienced not as in myself, but as in the object. . . . it was a creation for one’s self, for a single observer. . . . It was definitely a form of expression.14

Leo Stein’s psychic identification with a simple plate illustrates Bill Brown’s contention that “the tale of possession—of being possessed by possessions” supersedes their role as cultural commodities.15 The organic connection that Stein experienced resembles the Gilded Age woman’s psychological a‹nity for objects in her domestic environment. Like many of these emotionally fragile women, he turned to art as a soother and comforter, explaining that it “is what man does with his loneliness.”16 Subject to a lifelong neurosis, which he described in detail in Journey into the Self, Stein sought to bridge his isolation from the world in a phenomenological manner that was similar to the female propensity to experience art through “bodily presence.”17 He remained preoccupied with the psychology of “aesthetic vision” throughout his life and made it the centerpiece of his theory of “practical solipsism,” explaining that its aim was to cure the modern sense of “di-

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

179

68. Leo Stein in his studio, 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, c. 1905. Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

vided reality” between self and other.18 In exploring this aªective aspect of his character, Stein countered the overt masculinity of his sister’s mannerisms and taste. Although Gertrude Stein lived with bibelots in her private space, she did not engage with them emotionally like her brother, preferring to disassociate herself from the domestic. After Toklas replaced Leo at 27 rue de Fleurus, she famously assumed the role of femme de ménage, shopping, cooking, sewing, decorating the apartment, and sitting with the wives of male “geniuses” while their husbands talked to Gertrude.19 As one scholar argues, Gertrude acted out “the external conventions of bourgeois marriage,” playing “‘husband’ to Alice’s ‘wife.’”20 Thus the ostensibly domestic tone of Gertrude’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a tribute to her partner’s accomplishments rather than a reflection of the author’s own interests. Eschewing the emotionally freighted decorative arts, she preferred the more intellectually challenging art of painting. Unlike Gertrude, Leo Stein recognized no aesthetic hierarchy separating the fine and decorative arts. He argued: The distinction between the fine arts and the others, should not, in my opinion, have currency. . . . A tool handle is often as beautiful as a piece of sculpture. . . . It is much better

180

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

to call everything art which is deliberately produced by man, and not to be too fussy about the deliberation. . . . The eªect of thinking in terms of Fine Arts is almost altogether bad. It encourages the museum, the dilettante, the collector, the critic, and other futilities of a pseudo-civilisation.21

Despite Stein’s criticism of those who privileged the fine arts, Alfred Barr claimed him to be “possibly the most discerning connoisseur and collector of 20th-century painting in the world” between 1905 and 1907.22 It was during this time that Leo took Gertrude by the hand and introduced her to the canvases of Paul Cézanne, Auguste Renoir, Edgar Degas, Henri Matisse, Picasso, and other modern painters. Because brother and sister pooled their resources, they technically owned their purchases jointly; however, Leo was the scout who scoured the galleries and exhibitions for new art. In a single buying spree in 1905 at the dealer Vollard’s, he selected two works each by Cézanne, Renoir, and Paul Gauguin and advocated the purchase of Picasso’s Girl with a Basket of Flowers and three major works by Matisse: Joy of Life, Woman with a Hat, and Blue Nude.23 Leo maintained that until Gertrude bought a Cubist work by Picasso, “she was never responsible for a single picture that was bought, and always said so. She was always proud of her slow reaction time, and always said she couldn’t tell whether she liked a picture or not until she had lived with it, and so on.”24 Nonetheless, she basked in the avant-garde aura these works projected to her enraptured visitors. In her own good time, Gertrude came to strongly identify with the abstractions of Cézanne and Picasso. Whereas Leo appreciated Cézanne for his subtle color, tactile forms, and strong compositions, Gertrude responded to his handling of reality—she thought he captured an essential aspect of the world in his structure, what she called its “entity.” She explained: “Cézanne conceived the idea that in composition one thing was as important as another thing. Each part is as important as the whole and that impressed me so much that I began to write Three Lives under this influence and this idea of composition.”25 Just as Cézanne had done in his paintings, Stein attempted to “de-center” reality in her writing by treating everything on an equal basis without striving for a defining moment or climax. She particularly admired Cézanne’s Portrait of Mme Cézanne with Fan, which she and Leo purchased in 1906, and she insisted on keeping it, along with all the Picassos they had acquired, when they divided their collection in the wake of Toklas’s entry into Gertrude’s life. Gertrude gave the portrait primacy of place among the Picassos in her study, where she could gaze at it as she wrote at her desk (fig. 69). Picasso also admired this particular work by Cézanne and studied it repeatedly at the Steins’ Saturday evening salons, even allowing it to resonate in the portrait he painted of Gertrude in 1906 (fig. 70). In both portraits, the curve of the armchair separates figure from ground and the bodies are posed at three-quarter angles. Although Stein’s face is more masklike than Hortense Cézanne’s, their blank, staring eyes resemble one another’s. Robert Lubar reads more than Cézanne’s influence into Stein’s penetrating expression:

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

181

69. Gertrude Stein’s study, 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, 1914–15. Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

he attributes it to Picasso’s awareness of her lesbianism and the artist’s anxiety about exploring queer desire in his own life at this time.26 Whatever the artist’s motivations, Stein was delighted with her portrait, alleging that Picasso had risen to the level of Cézanne by eªectively capturing her essence. As far as she was concerned, that essence was her genius. Picasso’s portrait of Stein became her talisman, and she used it as his reputation grew to buttress her own. She even claimed that Picasso conceded that he had let her presence dominate his artistry, quoting him as saying: “No one will see the picture, they will see the legend of the picture, the legend that the picture has created. . . . A picture lives by its legend, not by anything else.”27 Visitors to the rue de Fleurus were no doubt aided in viewing Stein through the lens of Picasso’s portrait by her habit of sitting or standing near it. Man Ray captured this a‹nity in 1922 in a photograph that balances Stein’s substantial presence against the weight of her portrait (fig. 71). The composition al70. Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946 (47.106). © 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

182

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

71. Gertrude Stein seated before her portrait by Pablo Picasso, photographed by Man Ray in 1922. © 2008 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Telimage, Paris.

ludes to a narcissistic equation of her physical self with her ego-ideal and suggests that the ultimate fulfillment of her desire was not in a beloved other, but in a mirrored reflection of herself. That Stein relished this interchange between self and image was still evident over twenty years later, in 1945, when the novelist James Lord paid her a visit. Lord observed that the portrait’s “presence in that room was insistent and unforgettable, because in its own way it seemed Gertrude, while she in her own way seemed to be it.” Awed by her presence and reputation, Lord was convinced that he was viewing one genius painted by another: That one painting seemed to unite forever in a single work of art not only the artist and his model in their joint quest for immortality but also in an intimately independent way two beings of genius and both of their separate, incommunicable personalities.28

Was it Stein’s portrait that planted the idea in her visitor’s mind that her genius was on a par with Picasso’s, or had she nudged his thinking in this direction?

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

183

That Stein and Picasso belonged to diªerent biological sexes did not deter her in the least. She unabashedly proclaimed: “Pablo & Matisse have a maleness that belongs to genius Moi aussi, perhaps.”29 As a butch lesbian, Stein had already adopted a male subject position, which was reinforced around the time that Picasso was finishing her portrait by her reading of a newly published text that she used to rationalize and bolster her claim to male genius. We know that Stein read Otto Weininger’s Sex and Character soon after it was translated in 1906 because she recommended it to Etta Cone in glowing terms.30 Weininger maintained that everyone is made up of a mixture of male and female elements, going on to insist that only men could be geniuses and measuring women’s worth by the amount of masculinity they possessed. He claimed that “manlike women wear their hair short, aªect manly dress, study, drink, smoke,” and concluded that lesbians were superior to other women because they were more masculine.31 Despite Weininger’s antifeminine and anti-Semitic biases, Stein extracted the nugget she wanted from his text: masculine lesbians were more advanced than other women and therefore could enter the ranks of geniuses. Just as she was to sublimate her Jewishness during World War II when translating speeches for the Nazi sympathizer Marshall Philippe Pétain, she now denied her womanliness.32 According to her self-serving interpretation, a genius was a free agent who transcended sex and race. Given the inherent contradictions in the way Stein formulated her subjectivity, it is no wonder that the women who viewed her as a role model were equally as conflicted about their identities. Stein’s growing conviction that she had attained the status of a genius tipped the scale in her relationship with Leo. She could not forgive him for criticizing her prose style, claiming that his negativity “destroyed him for me and it destroyed me for him.”33 Lacking his sister’s extreme self-confidence, Leo blamed himself for their acrimonious break, frankly explaining: Gertrude’s sort of massive self-admiration, and, in part, self-assurance, enabled her to build something rather eªective on her foundations. I, on the other hand, through the upsetting, complicating and stultifying eªects of a terrific neurosis, could build nothing substantial on my intelligence, which came through only in fragments and distorted bits.34

Thrown together after the early deaths of their parents, Leo and Gertrude had been extraordinarily close. However, the sibling bond is, by its very nature, fraught with tension. Students of the brother-sister relationship conclude that although it holds the promise of great intimacy, it is ultimately unsatisfying because one or the other is ego-driven to search beyond its narrow confines.35 Gertrude had found a larger audience of admirers, including Toklas, who never doubted her genius. Thus, while a shift in the Steins’ relationship was inevitable, it was exacerbated by Gertrude’s unwavering belief in herself and Leo’s self-doubt. Despite their subsequent separation, both Steins continued to exert an influence on the American women collectors who ventured to Europe to broaden their horizons.

184

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

Deeply influenced by the Steins, Mabel Dodge was a collector, salonnière, writer, and tireless advocate for democratic causes. The number of personas Dodge adopted during her lifetime trumped Stein’s sole transition from well-bred Victorian medical student to lesbian avant-garde author and art collector. Dodge’s subjectivity was fashioned by her upper-class upbringing in Buªalo; four marriages; experience as an expatriate; heteroand homosexual aªairs; and artistic, political, and social radicalism. The latter she initiated in Greenwich Village and carried to New Mexico after her marriage to her fourth husband, Tony Luhan, a Native American, when she began to agitate for the rights of his people.36 It was in this late stage of her life that the bisexual Dodge reached a gendered resolution by following the Pueblo model of an integrated society that mutually respected males and females. Even though her voracious appetite feasted on a more exotic array than did either of the Steins’, Dodge credited Gertrude with helping her reclaim her individuality, telling her: “All my letters come to Mrs. Mabel Dodge where last year they came to Mrs. Edwin Dodge—that’s what you’ve done for one thing!”37 The impetus for this ingratiating remark was the Armory Show, which launched both Stein and Dodge in America. But before that spectacular public debut occurred, Dodge had prepared herself in private by exploring her identity through the world of objects. Much like Leo Stein, whom she admired for his “expounding, teaching, [and] interpreting,” she had turned to art as a palliative for her loneliness and depression.38 Dodge was directionless prior to her discovery that art could help to heal the abrasions of her earlier existence. Reared in the cloistered upper-class environment of Gilded Age domesticity, in a home she later described as a “dead Victorian” house, she was confused by the gender roles enacted by her parents, Sara and Charles Ganson. She witnessed her mother’s “assertion of ‘masculine’ drive within the confines of a highly conventional feminine role” and her father’s “fluctuations between hysteria and passive withdrawal.” Dodge’s unhappy childhood ill prepared her for the emotional roller coaster set in motion in her early twenties by postpartum depression following the birth of her son; the accidental hunting death of her first husband, Karl Evans, in their first year of marriage; the death of her father; and her mother’s discovery of Mabel’s aªair with her gynecologist.39 She suªered a nervous breakdown and was sent to Europe to recover. During her transatlantic crossing, she met Edwin Dodge, a Boston architect, whom she married in Paris in 1905. Her depression did not dissipate, however, since she felt romantically and sexually unfulfilled in her second marriage. It was only after she turned to collecting objects to furnish their home, the Villa Curonia in Florence, “as a substitute, to appease her longings for sensuous fulfillment,” that she regained a temporary sense of equilibrium.40 Like other female consumers of objets d’art, Dodge found strength in their restorative properties. She created a retreat in which she could heal her psyche, describing her home as “so reassuring, so loving, so embracing, and so alive like a womb.” Dodge decorated the yellow salon in the Villa Curonia with tactile objects that invited physical handling (fig. 72). The items she collected ranged from the realistic to the transcendent to the morbid—“porcelain urns, gold miniatures, ivory boxes, bronze, silver, glass things,”

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

185

72. Salon, Villa Curonia, Mabel and Edwin Dodge residence, Florence, c. 1905–15. Photo: Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

which she admitted were “of a very capricious, fanciful kind,” as well as tiny dogs “standing, sleeping, sitting, pointing, barking,” which she acknowledged were her “fantastic feminine oddments.” These she grouped on a Chippendale desk near a cluster of little skulls that she had collected from the bases of crucifixes, oªsetting them with Buddhist figures of compassion.41 Casually arrayed on tabletops, desks, bureaus, and her mantelpiece, the objects could be rearranged to fuel Dodge’s imagination and provide a psychic release. The word portrait that Gertrude Stein wrote after visiting her at the Villa Curonia captures Dodge’s perception of herself as an integral part of the decorative ensemble she had created: “That is what is done when there is done what is done and the union is won.”42 Leo Stein recognized a kindred spirit in Dodge because of their joint therapeutic need to invest emotional energy in art objects that could alleviate anxieties. He applauded the autobiography she penned about this phase in her life thirty years later, in which she applied the insights she had gained through psychoanalysis to fathoming her attachment to the decorative arts.43 She reached the conclusion that the symbiotic relationship she enjoyed with the beautiful things she collected for the Villa Curonia was a substitute for her unrequited physical desire. Dodge confessed:

186

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

I was a part of every room in it, of every strip of silk and velvet. I had lived desperately and in despair into every nuance and every glint seeking to lose my desire in them. In a lack of love I had tried to pass out of longing into materials—and out of my passion I had built my house.44

In oªering a rationale for why her internal conflict had induced her to form such a strong bond with objects as surrogates for people, Dodge was, in eªect, expressing one of Leo Stein’s key aesthetic axioms, which she liked to quote: “‘Tension’ he used to say, ‘is the requisite for a living work of art.’”45 In her case, she applied this maxim to life as well as art, since the two had merged in her psyche. The psychiatrist Jessica Benjamin stresses the many ways in which desire for relationships is internalized, creating a tension between the internal and the external.46 For Dodge, this tension was temporarily relieved by the feelings she invested in physical objects, but the deterioration of her marriage gave rise to conflicting emotions about her desire to seek fulfillment outside marriage. She explained that she felt trapped in the gilded cage she had created for herself: Now I was caught and entangled in it—inseparable from it—now it was too powerful for me to tear myself out of, to go seeking mere stark delight. I sometimes lay in my green and gold bed guarded by the four crusty lions, and I thought. . . . “Let’s go!” but another part sank deeper into feathers—allying itself with form—decreeing I should stay in my beautiful shell. So to protect and comfort ourselves do we build our prisons.47

The liberating promise of “escape” embedded in the contemplation of exquisite things was turned on its head as those very objects induced lassitude and inactivity. Instead of pushing her along the path of individuation or providing a creative burst of energy that would pivot her into the outside world, Dodge’s collection of inanimate possessions came to haunt her as empty signifiers. Resembling one of the characters in a story she wrote as a teenager, who “lived a sorry cage bird life,” Dodge pined away in her artful interior like Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s Lady of Shalott. At this stage of her life, she also resembled another fictional character, Oscar Wilde’s Dorian Gray, who lived in a similarly lavish palace of art that facilitated a “means of forgetfulness, modes by which he could escape.”48 Preferring her fantasies to reality, Dodge assumed the roles of characters in a makebelieve world, seamlessly interweaving her presence into the dreamlike space she had created by donning fanciful costumes inspired by the Villa Curiona’s Renaissance heritage and the sensuous designs she admired at the Ballets Russes (fig. 73).49 The sculptor Jo Davidson noted how fluidly Dodge blended her body with her décor: “Dressed in a Venetian gown, [she] floated through the vast halls looking for all the world as if she had always been a part of the mise-en-scène.”50 Davidson’s choice of words is telling, because Dodge was in eªect the theatrical director of her own carefully staged production. Collecting, as Michael Camille contends, is both a performance and an expression of

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

187

73. Mabel Dodge at Villa Curonia, 1911. Photo: Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

desire.51 Dodge enlisted her art objects and furnishings to convey strikingly diªerent aspects of her longing, with the result that the disjointed décor of the individual rooms in the Villa Curonia disclosed her fractured subjectivity. She designed the salon as a backdrop for her role as a worldly, expatriate hostess who encouraged philosophical discussions à la française. She described it as “eighteenth-century blue stocking, light, pale, and brightly French.” By contrast, in her bedroom she orchestrated a sensuous setting where she could play the role of vamp. Dodge basked in its erotic décor: Against the dappled, shimmering pale wall, a long narrow tapestry hung above the pillows, depicting a pale youth drawing a maid into the enchantment of a gray-green forest: moyen âge. . . . the folds of her flowing full skirt clumped into a bunch on one hip as she drifts, belly foremost, after her lover.52

188

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

Evocative of her libidinal stirrings, this passage hints at Dodge’s appreciation of the female body. She is much more explicit about her lesbian relationships and flirtation with Gertrude Stein elsewhere in her memoirs.53 Still formally married to Edwin Dodge at that time, Dodge may have employed theatricality as a parody of traditional feminine identity. Judith Butler sees gender in terms of the “fluidity of identities,” expressed through the stylized repetition of acts that are often subversive in defiance of the restrictive norm. She notes that performing gender was a strategy of survival for bisexual and lesbian women. Since Dodge was actively involved in staging her subjectivity, this analysis throws a diªerent light on her conduct. Just as her collection served a performative function, her provocative behavior concealed her attraction to women.54 Although Butler claims that such fantasies of representation should not be confused with psychic free play, it is evident that Dodge engaged with collecting as an imaginative form of playing. In her memoirs, she describes the milieu she created in the Villa Curonia as a “play-house” for the “amateur theatrical” of her life. Moreover, her preference for objects that invited touching and stroking, which she said she liked “to brood upon and to hold in my hand, to sniª at, to pass out into and explore,” links her to collectors of transitional objects.55 But her impulse to startle her visitors with daring juxtapositions of skulls, miniature dogs, and religious figurines suggests a more disruptive form of playing. Collecting, like many types of play, is fraught with paradox and often evokes tension between rationality and passion. Whereas D. W. Winnicott viewed playing as a joyful activity, Melanie Klein considered it an attempt to assuage inner discord on the part of both children and adults. According to Kleinian theory, however, images have an emancipatory power and the aesthetic experience of collecting can be considered a positive step toward achieving reparation, harmony, and wholeness.56 Dodge, in keeping with this analysis, externalized her fantasies through her staged environment as a means of acting out her internal conflicts and anchoring her fragile grasp on reality. Dodge’s fragmented modern subjectivity separates her from those earlier women collectors who sought wholeness from their gatherings of art objects. The same can be said about her dramatically sexed persona, which breached the realm of private contemplation and imaginative introspection signified by the soothing rhythm of playing associated with Gilded Age collecting. In her restless search for identity, Dodge cut a swath through the symbolic world of objects and their human counterparts in the hope that they would fill the void she felt within her and provide her with the sense of self she lacked. That situation did not change until 1912, when she wrenched herself away from the enervating environment she had created in Florence, left her husband, and returned to America, where she finally managed to separate art from life. On her return, Dodge settled in Greenwich Village, where she was instantly infected by the new cultural and social changes that had been initiated in her absence. A year later, the American academic Elsie Clews Parsons addressed Dodge’s social class in her book The Old-Fashioned Woman, in which she lambasted females who were solely interested in domesticity and motherhood and ridiculed the stultifying rituals of balls and debu-

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

189

74. Salon, Mabel Dodge residence, New York, 1916. Photo: Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

tante parties as thinly disguised marriage markets. Instead she recommended “trial marriages” in which women could test whether their personalities were inhibited by their mates.57 A defining characteristic of the New Women of the early twentieth century was their desire to find fulfillment through a combination of work and sexual relationships. Sexologists Havelock Ellis and Edward Carpenter advocated free love as an antidote to the capitalist economic oppression of women, while women writers such as Parsons and the Swedish feminist Ellen Key questioned the bourgeois conception of marriage.58 Dodge was exposed to the teachings of both women after she joined the feminist Heterodoxy Club in Greenwich Village. A complex woman with multifaceted interests, Elsie Clews Parsons was a wellqualified spokesperson for female modernists. Her biographer compares her life “to a modernist work of art, composed of a number of separate elements that merge in diªerent ways and frustrate any attempt by the viewer to impose an order or a category.”59 Although she was not a collector, she was familiar with the art world and sympathized with the limitations women artists faced. Her brother Henry was a sculptor and her sister-inlaw was the international arts patron Marie Clews, who founded the Franco-American La

190

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

Napoule Art Foundation. Parsons was also closely associated with several of the women who contributed to the gendering of culture in the modern period, including Alva Smith Vanderbilt, whom she helped to recruit speakers for a 1909 meeting of suªragists at Marble House in Newport.60 Trained as an anthropologist with Alfred Kroeber, Parsons applied her studies of other cultures to a new sociology of contemporary women in her writings and lectures at Columbia University and the New School of Social Research. Her Journal of a Feminist, begun in 1913, is a thinly disguised autobiography in which she positions herself as a native informant who comments on the upper-class social prohibitions of her peers. She skillfully intertwines themes that preoccupied her in her more scholarly publications: sexual taboos, gendered identity, individualism, and performativity. Like Stein’s autobiography, Parsons’s is a decentered narrative featuring a female subject who contradicts the notion of a unified self. She presents herself simultaneously as a modern career woman who is also a mother, a devoted wife who approves of sex outside marriage, and a feminine woman who is determined to traverse the frontier of her gender. Parsons’s anthropological observations of gender elasticity in other cultures led her to question the narrow definitions of her own. After attending a lecture by the sex researcher Dr. Oscar Riddle sponsored by the Feminist Forum at Columbia, she pondered her personal enactment of gender: This morning perhaps I may feel like a male; let me act like one. This afternoon I may feel like a female; let me act like one. At midday or at midnight I may feel sexless; let me therefore act sexlessly. Even nowadays women resent having always to act like women, or to be treated invariably as women.61

Frustrated by the social inhibitions of her class, Parsons refused to be contained by its strictures. Dodge quickly embraced her views and those of the members of the Heterodoxy Club, whom she described as “unorthodox women, women who did things and did them openly.”62 To express her incarnation as a New Woman in Greenwich Village, Dodge abandoned the rich brocades, tapestries, and shelves of objets d’art of her Florentine existence in favor of a pared-down aesthetic. She anticipated the Museum of Modern Art’s “white cube” by covering the walls and moldings of the salon in her apartment on lower Fifth Avenue in white, which she also chose for the mantelpiece, curtains, and bear rug (fig. 74). Reflecting on her motivations, Dodge at first speculated that she was attempting “a repudiation of grimy New York,” but she came to the realization that she was purging herself of her psychological clutter. She writes in her memoirs: “Alas! I couldn’t live by things alone.” Life had become more important to her than art. “Life was ready to take a new form of some kind and many people felt a common urge to shape it. . . . The most that anyone knew was the old ways were about over, and the new ways all to create. The city was teeming with potentialities.”63

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

191

The first cause to attract Dodge’s attention was the Armory Show, which oªered her a readymade vehicle for the new way of life she was determined to pursue. In Florence she had indulged in the penchant of Gilded Age women for defining personality through objects, but now she realized that art could do much more for her if she reached outward and combined it with activism. Dodge immediately set about helping to finance the Armory Show, joining Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller, Lillie Bliss, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, and the other female patrons who donated money to cover its expenses. Along with her check for five hundred dollars, she enclosed a note expressing her commitment to introducing modern art to Americans: I’ll be delighted to help in any way in the exhibition, because I think it the most important thing that ever happened in America, of its kind. Anything that will extend the unawakened consciousness here (or elsewhere) will have my support. . . . The majority are content to browse upon past achievements. What is needed is more, more and always more consciousness, both in art and in life.64

Dodge quickly became deeply involved in the organization of the Armory Show, serving as vice president of the Association of Artists and Sculptors, which sponsored the exhibition. She was exhilarated by the opportunity to be recognized for her own achievements for the first time in her life, exclaiming: “I felt as though the Exhibition were mine. I really did. It became, over night, my own little Revolution. I would upset America.”65 In the end, however, Dodge made her greatest mark in the context of the Armory Show, not through her organizational contribution or financial donation, nor through the painting she lent to the exhibition, but due to the three hundred copies she circulated of the word portrait Gertrude Stein had written about her the previous year. Dodge artfully bound Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia (plate 11) in a reddish-peach and chrome green Florentine floral pattern, revealing that she had not entirely divested herself of her penchant for the ornate. She may, however, have been inspired to select this surprisingly conservative design by the flower-patterned cover of the program published a year earlier for the controversial Cubist House exhibit in Paris, which also contained radically advanced ideas within its conventional wrapper.66 Dodge printed Stein’s essay together with an introduction of her own, titled “Speculations, or Post-Impressionism in Prose,” in which she helped to explicate Stein’s fragmented prose by correlating her with Picasso and explaining that her innovation was to impel “language to induce new states of consciousness” in a way that produced a new “creative art rather than a mirror of history.”67 Publicly paired with Stein, Dodge instantly achieved a reputation as an avant-gardist when her widely discussed essay was reprinted in two journals, Arts and Decoration and Camera Work. She was delighted with her ensuing notoriety, boasting that “if Gertrude Stein was born at the Armory show, so was ‘Mabel Dodge.’ . . . I had rapidly become a mythological figure right in my own lifetime.”68 Her hubris in echoing Stein’s claim to legendary status may explain why Dodge has invited controversy ever since.

192

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

Leo Stein, still smarting from the dissolution of his living arrangement with his sister, parodied his former protégé after the Armory Show in a verse beginning: “Mabel Dodge / Hodge Podge.”69 He would later forgive her, however, when they reunited in Taos while Dodge was involved in promoting the culture and political rights of the Pueblo Indians. Her proactive support of workers in the Paterson strike also quelled the critics who had dismissed her as a dilettantish rich woman. Dodge’s biographer Lois Rudnick confesses that she agreed with Dodge’s detractors at first, but after delving more deeply into her subject’s life, came to see her in the tradition of American utopianists who have subordinated themselves to larger goals for the greater good.70 More recently, the historian Christine Stansell also came to Dodge’s defense, concluding that despite her idiosyncrasies, she was genuinely committed to fostering political and aesthetic creativity.71 The balance between aestheticism and activism through which Dodge was able to attain an integrated identity was achieved by another woman collector who circulated in Gertrude Stein’s orbit while she explored her sexuality and carried the lessons she learned back to the United States. Emily Chadbourne fled abroad to escape the stifling social conventions and sexual codes of her upbringing and sought consolation in art. Like Dodge, she was emboldened by her exposure to Stein in Paris at a crucial point in her life, telling her: “I admire you because you dare to be free.”72 Chadbourne was less sexually experimental than Dodge, however, and settled into a lasting same-sex relationship after a disastrous marriage. Although she was nearly as passionate about the decorative arts as Dodge, she maintained a certain distance between herself and her possessions, perhaps because she discovered the benefits of political activism sooner rather than later in life. Nor was Chadbourne a self-promoter like Dodge, which may explain why she is virtually unknown today, except by the curators of the museums to which she left her vast collection. Yet, because she was strategically placed at the crossroads of aesthetic, social, and sexual modernism, there are tantalizing clues to her complex character in her correspondence with Stein, Evelyn Waugh’s description of his encounter with her in Ethopia, and in the brief account of Chadbourne’s life written by her niece, Dr. Margaret Gildea, a Jungian analyst. The daughter of an overbearing Chicago plumbing magnate who did not believe in the benefits of higher education, Chadbourne married early and unhappily.73 Gildea theorizes that her aunt went to Europe after her divorce in 1905 “because she felt herself so disgraced.”74 Even though Illinois was one of the first states to grant women the right to divorce, in 1818, it remained a social stigma both there and throughout the United States well into the twentieth century, especially in the upper reaches of society. Dodge expressed the attitude of her contemporaries when she exclaimed: “Divorce? It was worse than leprosy in those days.”75 Chadbourne searched for comfort in a circle of women who enjoyed each other’s company, finally forming a permanent relationship with Ellen La Motte, who had trained as a nurse at Johns Hopkins at the same time that Stein was in medical school there. Settling in Paris, Chadbourne and La Motte were frequent visitors to 27 rue de Fleurus, often bringing other American women with them, such as Sarah Sears, the

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

193

exotic Boston collector and photographer. Whereas Chadbourne’s introduction to Stein had been brokered by La Motte, she entered the international bohemian set through her friend Isabella Stewart Gardner and their mutual acquaintance Matthew Prichard, an English aesthete.76 Chadbourne entertained members of the Bloomsbury group, including the critic Roger Fry, artist Augustus John, and collector Lady Ottoline Morrell in a second apartment she maintained in London on Park Lane. Impressed by her collection, they enlisted her support in their projects. Though she was deferential to Stein’s flinty intellect, Chadbourne nonetheless tempered her collecting of modernist works by male artists with tactile objects. She acquired hundreds of textiles, carpets, porcelain, glass, and other assorted objets d’art in her travels throughout Europe and Asia, storing them in warehouses in London and Paris. Unafraid of taking risks, she ran afoul of customs agents who accused her of smuggling a celebrated series of Ffoulke tapestries into America in 1908 as a favor to Gardner, who had let her display them in her London flat.77 Although her earlier and stronger commitment was to the “lesser arts,” Chadbourne was also recognized as a connoisseur of fine arts. In 1909 Fry asked her to guide Morrell around artists’ studios and dealers’ showrooms in Paris to survey loans for his first Post-Impressionist exhibition, to which Chadbourne was to lend three works by Matisse as well as eight Gauguin watercolors and drawings.78 According to the artist William Rothenstein, “Mrs. Chadbourne had exquisite taste, with the means to satisfy it,” an opinion that is a‹rmed by Miranda Seymour, who notes that “few women were said to be better informed about modern French painting.”79 “This little, quiet, pale, composed, remote woman” escorted Morrell on a tour of modern art, including the Manets and Cézannes in the Pellerin collection in Neuilly, Matisse’s studio (where Chadbourne purchased a sculpture), Vollard’s gallery and home, and, of course, 27 rue de Fleurus. Morrell was both intrigued and puzzled by her American hostess. She mulled: She appeared so completely detached, as if she was absorbed in contemplation—but of what? Sometimes I felt that she had drifted into our passionate and exciting modern world from a novitiate in a Buddhist temple. . . . I felt that it was she who had come, not from a new country but from some old, old worn-out land where all enthusiasm, all power of feeling had been burnt out, and who watched and watched—occasionally smiling a very charming, sad, disillusioned smile at the antics of these silly people.80

Chadbourne’s lack of aªect can be traced to her lonely childhood. Her mother died when she was fifteen years old; consequently, according to Gildea, “her social life was not very well developed since there was really no one to help her with it.”81 Those who knew her as an adult perceived her as passive and pensive, with “a quiet contemplative disposition.”82 Chadbourne’s serenity is the salient feature of Tsugouharu Foujita’s 1922 portrait of her, which she gave to the Art Institute of Chicago (plate 12). Posed like an odalisque, she

194

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

75. Ellen La Motte with her black cockatoo, from an unidentified newspaper clipping, dated January 17, 1928. Photo: Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62–118188.

resembles a decorous version of Édouard Manet’s Olympia, replete with black cat. Although the artist chose to work in tempera rather than oil, he achieves a suggestion of facture through his subtly contrasting textures: the striated gray stone wall in the background sets oª the incised patterning of the warmer umber-hued divan and pillows. This play of tonal values recalls the ukiyo-e prints of the artist’s Japanese heritage, which Chadbourne also collected. Foujita skillfully blends these dark and light passages together in the body of the cat and in Chadbourne’s flowered vest, which resembles those surprisingly ornate garments that were Gertrude Stein’s sole concession to fashion.83 It is not only this item of clothing, however, that ties Chadbourne to Stein’s proclivities, but her direct, unflinching stare, which echoes that of Victorine Meurent, a well-known lesbian cross-dresser, who modeled for Manet’s Olympia.84 Since Foujita also painted Stein’s portrait and another more intimate scene of two lesbians in their boudoir, this association may not be coincidental. The mysterious ambience that Chadbourne created through her collection of paintings, furnishings, and objets d’art and that so intrigued Morrell points to the multiple layers of her fractured sense of self. As with other sexually transgressive women, Chadbourne’s subjectivity was split by the tension between her desire and her internalization of social mores. Mirroring the butch-femme roles in the Stein-Toklas relationship, Chadbourne played Alice to La Motte’s Gertrude. She transferred her dependence on her father to La Motte, on whom she “leaned very heavily . . . for companionship, advice, and aªection.”85 Featured in a newspaper photograph in 1928 with her rare black cockatoo from New Guinea (fig. 75), La Motte exudes the wry confidence expected of a nurse who had served on the battlefront in World War I. Stein reports that La Motte joined the frontline hospital established by Mary Borden, a wealthy Chicago novelist. Horrified by this experience, especially the indiscriminate use of morphine, La Motte exposed the brutal-

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

195

ities and suªering she witnessed in her book The Backlash of War (1916). Considered an example of emerging female modernism today, her book was deemed antipatriotic by the U.S. government, which inked out advertisements for it that appeared in the Liberator when the United States entered the war in 1918.86 By that time, however, La Motte and Chadbourne had left for China to embark on what would become their lifelong campaign to oppose the opium monopoly. La Motte penned several books on the subject, and they both frequently testified on the topic before the League of Nations.87 The novelist Evelyn Waugh encountered Chadbourne and La Motte on one of their fact-finding missions when they stopped in Addis Ababa to attend the coronation of Emperor Haile Selassie in 1930. He first mentions the pair in Remote People (1931), his nonfiction account of his travels in Ethiopia, where Chadbourne and La Motte appear as “two formidable ladies in knitted suits and topis; though unrelated by blood, long companionship had made them almost indistinguishable, square-jawed, tight-lipped, with hard, discontented eyes.”88 They reappear in his novel Black Mischief (1932), where they are given an expanded role as the characters Dame Mildred Porch and Miss Sarah Tin. Although Waugh’s treatment of them is parodic at first, he finally comes to admire their sincerity. Nonetheless, by observing that “each had smoked spectacles and a firm mouth,” Waugh places them in the tradition of earlier missionaries who inflexibly set out to convert the world to their point of view.89 On her travels through Kyoto, Shanghai, Phnom Penh, and other points on the compass, Chadbourne demonstrated another kind of missionary zeal by absorbing the decorative arts she saw into her collection. She acquired Japanese ceramics and dolls, Persian rugs and pottery, and Tibetan paintings, as well as European textiles, porcelain, silver, glass, and furniture. Over the course of her lifetime, she gave more than 1,700 objects, including five trunks of textiles, to the Art Institute of Chicago, whose Antiquarian Society she had long supported.90 Founded in 1889 by women who wished to encroach on the Art Institute’s all-male preserve, including Bertha Honoré Palmer and Frances Glessner, the Antiquarian Society was initially dedicated to expanding the institute’s textile collection. The interests of its members had expanded to encompass the entire field of decorative art by the time Chadbourne contributed $25,000 to the cause. In 1926 she donated an additional $20,000 to ensure that decorative objects were properly installed, instructing that the money “not be applied to upkeep such as scrubbing floors or to the purchase of objects.”91 She also donated one of the Art Institute’s eighteenth-century British rooms in memory of her brother Richard Crane in 1950. After Chadbourne and La Motte returned to America in 1924, they divided their time between Washington, DC and “Sally’s Tock” in Stone Ridge, New York, an old stone inn that Chadbourne renovated. She became active in local cultural aªairs and served as president of Senate House Museum in Kingston, to which she gave more than three hundred American items of fine and decorative art. Chadbourne demonstrated her playfulness when she “wittily and whimsically” arranged her collection of dolls, miniature furniture, and toys in one of the upstairs rooms at Senate House.92 Secure in her relationship with

196

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

La Motte, she belatedly indulged in the imaginative free play that had been abruptly interrupted by the death of her mother. Although Chadbourne was inspired by Gertrude Stein’s example in collecting twodimensional works by male modernists (she gave sixty-six works by Gauguin, Matisse, Henri Rousseau, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, and Salvador Dalí, among others, to the Art Institute), she did not share Stein’s penchant for the challenging compositions of Cézanne and Picasso. Once back in the United States, Chadbourne focused on the paintings of John Vanderlyn and sponsored a major exhibition of his work in Kingston in 1938. Demonstrating her mettle, she hired agents to comb Europe for Vanderlyn’s panorama of Versailles, which had disappeared after it was last exhibited in New York in 1829. The search went on for many years until Chadbourne eventually successfully presented the reassembled work to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1952.93 Little did she realize that a section had been on display a century earlier only one hundred miles away, in Saratoga Springs, when Eliza Bowen Jumel commandeered it as a backdrop for her theater.94 Remarkably, the histories of these two nonconformist women collectors who carved out identities for themselves a century apart merged in the provenance of this elusive work of art. It was not their only point in common: both found female mentors abroad who influenced their collecting patterns, returned to America to share their cultural capital, and refused to comply with normative standards of femininity. Claribel and Etta Cone also went abroad in search of more personal freedom than America allowed and discovered that art was a vehicle through which they could clarify their identities and express themselves. Like their friends Gertrude and Leo Stein, the Cone sisters were American but Francophile and middle-class but nonconformist. They broke ranks with Gertrude Stein, however, in their attitude toward the decorative arts. Although both sisters were patrons of Matisse, Picasso, and other male modernists, they avidly collected objets d’art, an enthusiasm they shared with Leo Stein. Their bequest to the Baltimore Museum of Art in 1950 included textiles ranging from Coptic fragments to Middle Eastern silk, jewelry, furniture, oriental rugs, African carvings, and antique ivories and bronzes. The two sets of siblings first met in Baltimore in 1892 when Gertrude and Leo Stein moved there to live with an aunt following the deaths of their parents. The Cones were wealthier than the Steins, thanks to the family’s profitable string of cotton mills throughout the South. Their progressive father left an annual income to his daughters as well as his sons when he died in 1897. This made it possible for Claribel to complete her medical degree at Johns Hopkins University and to travel to Europe to pursue postgraduate research into the nature of fat cells and for Etta to make thirty-two transatlantic crossings in pursuit of culture. It also gave the sisters enough discretionary capital to gather a collection of over three thousand works of fine and decorative art.95 The Steins often attended the Saturday evening salon hosted by the Cone sisters in their Baltimore apartment, so it was only natural that Etta would contact them when she went abroad for the first time in 1901. While Leo opened her eyes to the pleasures of art,

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

197

76. Gertrude Stein, Etta Cone, and Claribel Cone, July 1903. Photo: Gertrude Stein Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

Gertrude awakened her sexuality. An entry in Etta’s travel diary of that year indicates that the two women immediately got oª on an intimate footing: “Talked with Gertrude of her pet subject of Human intercourse of the sexes. She is truly interesting.”96 It has been suggested that their aªair began at this time and that Stein prolonged it by sailing back to America with Cone; writing in her diary during the crossing, Etta suggestively confided: “Clear and beautiful day which I spent mostly below in a most beautiful state of mind, but one which brought out the most exquisite qualities of Gertrude.”97 That Stein subsequently recommended Weininger’s Sex and Character to Etta rather than to her older, more forceful sister is indicative of their shared personal history. Although Gertrude ostensibly had more in common with Claribel due to their mutual training in medicine and dedication to toppling professional barriers, it was Etta, the quieter, more feminine sister, with whom she formed an emotional alliance. In a photograph of the three women (fig. 76), taken in 1903 during Etta’s second trip abroad, when Gertrude oªered to squire the sisters around Europe, Etta and Gertrude are smiling and relaxed, while the sterner, more formally dressed Claribel appears to be the odd woman out. Etta was so taken with Gertrude and the Parisian scene that she rented an apartment there during the winter of 1905–6 while Claribel continued her research in Frankfurt. It was Leo Stein, however, who first excited her interest in modern art.

198

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

Leo served as Etta’s cicerone on her first trip abroad, guiding her through the palaces, churches, and museums of Italy. She wrote of his “wonderful brain” in her diary: “It is marvellous to me to find him absolutely well grounded in every possible field of thought.”98 Leo at this time was developing his formalist doctrine based on tactile values and compositional tension, which he patiently imparted to his willing student. Etta said she considered him her “teacher” and, according to her nephew Edward Cone, later insisted that “it was Leo, and not Gertrude, who had developed the real eye for modern art and hence had contributed significantly to her own education.”99 This evidence supports the theory that Leo Stein played a larger role in shaping the understanding of aesthetic modernism among its earliest American collectors than his sister. Etta Cone was initially a reluctant supporter of the avant-garde. When Gertrude took her to Picasso’s studio to see her portrait, Etta disliked the image, saying she found it unflattering. Nonetheless, at Gertrude’s urging, she bought a watercolor and an etching from the artist. If Gertrude urged Etta along the road to collecting modern art, Leo provided her with the knowledge to appreciate it. Claribel Cone also fell under Leo Stein’s sway and heavily annotated one of the three copies of his A-B-C of Aesthetics the sisters owned. It is perhaps due to his influence that they failed to appreciate Picasso’s Cubist phase, which Leo summarily dismissed as “funny business.”100 Both sisters frequently referred to Leo Stein’s theories in the lectures they gave about modern art, indicating that to them tactile values were more significant than abstract form in the paintings in their collection.101 For this reason, the Cones felt a greater a‹nity with Matisse than Picasso, although they were initially taken aback by his Fauvist “distortions and exaggerations” on display at the Salon d’Automne in 1905, when Claribel arrived in Paris in time to join Etta and the Steins in viewing the exhibition. After taking a couple of months to warm to his work, the Cones purchased the first of the forty-two paintings and more than four hundred prints, drawings, and illustrated books by Matisse that they would eventually feature in their collection.102 Their tastes were not uniform, however. Etta consistently preferred Matisse’s softer, decorative still lifes and interiors, and although Claribel acquired a number of works in this vein, she came to favor his stronger, more challenging figural compositions. The contrast between the sisters was almost as stark as the diªerence between a negative and a print. Claribel was more sharply focused in her appearance and her likes and dislikes. Gertrude Stein zeroed in on this distinction in her description of them in Two Women: “There were two of them, they were sisters, they were large women, they were rich, they were very diªerent one from the other one. . . . The older one was more something than the younger one.”103 Virtually everyone who met the Cones was struck by the contrast between Claribel’s worldly, assertive personality and Etta’s quieter, more pliant mien. Matisse, who knew them both well, considered them “two opposing characters from the same family”: Since they are sisters—one of them beautiful, a great beauty, noble and glorious, lovely hair with ample waves in the old style—satisfied and dominating—the other with the

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

199

majesty of a Queen of Israel, but with lovely lines that fall, however, like those in her face, but with a depth of expression which is touching—always submissive to her glorious sister but attentive to everything.104

A fundamental diªerence in the psychology and collecting patterns of the two sisters is underlined in the circumstances under which Matisse’s Blue Nude entered the Cones’ collection. As an educated New Woman, Claribel prided herself in possessing character traits that were considered more masculine than feminine in her day—outspokenness, independence, and professionalism. These qualities are evident in her aggressive approach to the art market. She had admired Blue Nude in the Steins’ collection before sister and brother divided the spoils and Leo claimed it. Although the Cones bought several works of art from the Steins at this time, they missed the opportunity to buy this painting. Leo sold it in 1913 after lending it to the Armory Show, and it passed through the hands of several dealers, briefly entering John Quinn’s collection before it was auctioned as part of his estate in 1926. Claribel was determined to have it, and although she could not be present at the sale, she instructed Gertrude and Leo’s brother Michael to bid on it for her.105 She showcased the painting in her apartment in Baltimore, where it dominated one wall (fig. 77). The simple lines of the wooden bookcase and cabinet that flank the painting do nothing to alleviate Matisse’s bold eªect. Although his subject is a nude woman, there is nothing sensuous about his treatment of the figure: the masklike face and heavy black outlining of her body nullify the carnal appeal of her flesh. A year after she successfully acquired Blue Nude, Claribel told Etta that she was no longer interested in Matisse’s recent work, claiming “Matisse has seen the heyday of his virility.”106 She was perhaps influenced by Gertrude Stein, for whom “virility” had been an element in her earlier aesthetic appreciation of Matisse. Stein singled out that quality when she observed: “Matisse had an astonishing virility that always gave one an extraordinary pleasure.”107 Even though she switched her allegiance to Picasso, Stein insisted on keeping Matisse’s Fauvist Woman with a Hat when she and Leo divided their collection. Claribel’s aesthetic, however, was more subtly gendered than Gertrude’s in two ways: she craved therapeutic comfort rather than intellectual stimulation from the paintings she bought, and she perceived her collection as an extension of her body. The philosopher George Boas recognized that Claribel Cone’s collection was a fluid entity that extended from the walls of her home to the “wearable” art with which she adorned herself. His recollection of visits to her apartment during his tenure at Johns Hopkins University reveals that he saw no separation between the collector and the collection: One entered a door whose glass panel was backed with a Japanese brocade, came into a hall to put one’s coat on an old Italian chair, saw a Matisse over the Steinway piano, sat on Hepplewhite chairs in the dining room, and, if one were young, sat entranced watching a pendant composed of three long Spanish ear-rings slowly rise and fall on Dr. Cone’s bosom.108

200

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

77. Claribel Cone residence, Baltimore, n.d., with Henri Matisse’s The Blue Nude (1907), art © 2008 Succession H. Matisse/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

On other occasions Claribel adorned her coiªure with Hindu silver skewers or African ivory combs and draped herself with Renaissance pendants, embroidered Kashmir shawls, North African burnooses, or the saris she found so irresistible. She exclaimed: “How the saris wind themselves about my very heart—‘throat’ would be better for they strangled out all other impulses.”109 Claribel so closely identified with the objects she acquired that she did not perceive them as collectibles, declaring: “I didn’t even know that the things I had could be called a collection until people began to use the term in talking to me about them.”110 Everything she purchased had a use value to her, whether in the practical sense of art that could be worn as clothing or jewelry, or in the psychological sense of providing a psychic release. Even though Cone was ostensibly a modern woman, she intuitively responded to the feminine tradition of intimately identifying with enchanted objects. Like the harried businessmen who retreated into restfully decorative interiors in order to restore themselves, Cone used her collection to buttress herself from the demands of the world. She admitted: “On the whole I find things so much more satisfactory than

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

201

78. Foyer, Claribel Cone residence, Baltimore, n.d. Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

people—people are interesting but you cannot live with them as satisfactorily as with things—things are soothing if they are works of art—most people are over-stimulating.”111 As a counterpoint to the austere wall in her apartment featuring Matisse’s Blue Nude, she created a welcoming entrance foyer with painted floral panels and soft draperies that complemented the painting she placed on the right wall, Matisse’s lyrical Festival of the Flowers in Nice (fig. 78). In desiring to escape through art, Cone was a perfect candidate for the canvases Matisse said he designed for overwrought urbanites, to provide “a soothing, calming influence on the mind.”112 In other words, the tastes of New Women like Claribel Cone were regendered when they realized, as did many of the men whose world they had infiltrated, that the restful decorative schemes favored by less ambitious women could provide a respite from the stresses and strains of competitive modern life. Etta Cone, as the family caretaker, was more in tune with the consoling interiors favored by women of the previous generation. Even so, her transgressive sexuality prevents her from being classified as a typical hausfrau. It may have also resulted in some of her more adventurous purchases, notably Picasso’s several treatments of hairdressing subjects. In her apartment she prominently displayed La Coiªure (1906; fig. 79), painted the same year as his iconic portrait of Stein. The model’s crossed arms push her ample

202

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

79. Etta Cone residence, Baltimore, 1906, with Pablo Picasso’s La Coiªure (1906), art © 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

breasts over the rim of her plunging neckline, resulting in the sort of suggestive image one would not have expected to find in the parlor of a maiden lady. Less erotic but still sensuous are the many reclining odalisques Etta acquired from Matisse. Exuding the ambrosial scent of Moroccan and Turkish harems and embellished with lush contrasting patterns, these compositions conjured imaginative communities of languid women that were far removed from Etta Cone’s day-to-day life but would have provided rich fodder for her fantasies and allowed her to escape into an empyrean where no one could judge her. Although she maintained a series of close same-sex relationships throughout her life, she lived alone after her sister’s death in 1929.113 Etta Cone’s commitment to the world of women influenced her bequest to the Baltimore Museum of Art. When Claribel died, she indicated in her will that she was uncertain whether the city was ready to receive her collection. She left the decision to Etta, specifying “that in the event the spirit of appreciation for modern art in Baltimore becomes improved, and if the Baltimore Museum of Art should be interested in my said Collection . . . [it should be] favorably considered.”114 Fearing competition from the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, Harvard University, and a host of other museums, two prescient women administrators at the museum assiduously cultivated a relationship with Etta. Adelyn Breeskin, the director, and Gertrude Rosenthal, the chief curator, invited Etta to visit New York galleries with them, vetted purchases for her, and maintained constant contact with her. Breeskin recollected that her “main goal” after she was appointed director in 1942 was “befriending Etta and her family. And seeing that she realized that there was su‹cient interest in modern art.” She also wanted to “make her see how appreciative I was.”115 Breeskin could appeal to Etta’s homosociality by citing the example of several additional women collectors who were deeply committed to the Baltimore Museum of Art. Mary Frick Garrett Jacobs had been a prime mover behind its founding and had served as president of the board of trustees, bequeathing her collection of old masters, French eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury painting, and English portraits in 1934. Etta was also familiar with the Adler sisters, whose collections of modernist art would have been more to her taste. Blanche Adler donated numerous prints to the museum, while Saidie Adler May focused on Surrealist and American Abstract Expressionist painting, which she divided between the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art. This matronage network of curators and collectors ultimately persuaded Cone in 1949 that Baltimore was indeed ready to receive the collection she and her sister had spent years creating.116 It would become part of a larger sisterhood of the arts with local roots but national implications. Claribel and Etta Cone’s bequest signaled a tidal shift in the gendered interpretation of cultural property in the United States.117 In donating their collection to the public, they joined the Hewitt sisters, the women founders of the Museum of Modern Art, Hilla Rebay, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in challenging the patriarchal prerogative to the ownership of cultural property. Unlike many of the other major actors in this drama, however, the Cone sisters have

204

•

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

not been concealed by history: their collection remains intact in a separate wing of the Baltimore Museum of Art that pays homage to their inclusive taste for the fine and decorative arts. As a result, their contributions have not been eªaced, like those of so many women who struggled to found museums in this country or donated collections of objets d’art and paintings only to have them dismantled in the service of the male modernist ethos of aesthetic purity. The names of still other female donors whose collections languish in museum storage vaults are “present but not visible” in the annals of American museology.118 By becoming visible, the Cone sisters inspired numerous other women to follow suit. Why? Claribel Cone grappled with that question and came to the conclusion that the consumption of aesthetic objects satisfied a basic human need. She reflected: Now that I stop to reason about it, it is silly foolishness this collecting of things!—but it must have some solid foundation—some foundation deep in the hearts of peoples—for look at the thousands who are moved by this same impulse—and look at the museums that have been formed to satisfy this impulse—It is the craving for beauty that is such a vital function of the human soul—that’s it—the craving for beauty—for perfection.—some say that is one way of finding the path to God—is it?119

The craving for beauty that she identifies led women to search in many diªerent directions. We have seen that the female patrons of modernism followed two divergent paths: the recognized route, which led to greater and greater abstraction, and the less-traveled corridor, which connected the decorative arts of the past with the present. Both sets of travelers altered the dominant discourse of possessive individualism by imbuing it with a feminine sensibility, but were in turn transformed when they inserted themselves into the public world of male modernism. The resulting gendering of culture was an unstable enterprise that was constantly buªeted by competing claims to the proprietorship of cultural property. Despite the strides made by New Women in asserting their sexual identity and combining art with activism, many were disappointed by their lack of lasting influence. Commenting on this situation, Caroll Smith-Rosenberg observes: “The New Women of the 1920s did not fail because they chose the wrong discourse. They failed because they lacked the real economic and institutional power with which to wrest hegemony from men and so enforce their vision of a gender-free world.”120 But what of those women who had access to economic as well as cultural capital? In the waning years of the Progressive Era, many elite collectors retreated into the past and consoled themselves with the treasures of another era. Other financially empowered women were more resilient: they looked backward as well as forward by combining nostalgia for the past with a utopian vision of the future. Although they have been written out of history, they were a vibrant presence in the cultural life of America in the years before World War II.

T H E S E X I N G O F TA S T E

•

205

EPILOGUE

Y Modernist Nostalgia EDITH ROCKEFELLER MCCORMICK • MARY HOPKINS EMERY MABEL DODGE • MARION KOOGLER MCNAY

M

“

ODERNIST NOSTALGIA” MAY SOUND like a contradiction in terms. How can a desire for the past be modern? I am coining the phrase to describe collectors who were fully engaged in modern life but still longed for a preindustrial Eden free of technology, speed, and constant striving. Conflicted feelings about the modern world led to a yearning for a happier place—an ideal that had been lost in the rush to modernization. Collectors hoped that art would forge a link in the unbroken chain of human experience, that it would induce waking dreams and propel them above the hubbub of everyday life to a more spiritual place. Nostalgia and modernity are like Jekyll and Hyde, according to Svetlana Boym, who argues in The Future of Nostalgia that they are alter egos with one foot in the present and one foot in the past.1 Modernist nostalgia, in other words, is a paradox that reflects a consciousness simultaneously engaged and disengaged with the modern world. If this pattern seems familiar, it is because it is an extension of the Arts and Crafts ideal of preindustrial harmony as well as the Aesthetic movement’s desire for intense, reflective experiences. Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Mary Hopkins Emery preferred to live amidst art objects produced in earlier eras, but they were also canny pragmatists whose forwardlooking ideas succeeded in linking the past and present. Although these Progressive Era women continued to create restorative retreats furnished with handcrafted objets d’art where they could escape routine and daydream about a better future, they diªered from the women of the Gilded Age; they were no longer at the margins of society, nor were they lachrymose with unsatiated desire. Nostalgia empowered rather than immobilized them in their search for utopian antidotes to modern malaise. Some women took their quest

206

to the source: Mabel Dodge and Marion Koogler McNay moved to Taos, New Mexico, where they immersed themselves in Pueblo communal culture, supplemented their collections of modern art with its artifacts, and championed the rights of Native people. Many more wealthy women collectors combined premodern with contemporary art in the 1920s and 1930s. Abigail Aldrich Rockefeller blended American folk art into her avant-garde collection, and although she aided her husband in the restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, she commissioned contemporary artists Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler to paint its buildings.2 Mildred Bliss also negotiated between past and present: she shared her husband Robert’s enthusiasm for collecting Byzantine, early Christian, and Pre-Columbian art while exercising the prerogatives of a progressive New Woman. She collaborated with the female landscape architect Beatrix Jones Farrand in transforming the property surrounding Dumbarton Oaks, her home in Washington, DC, into a nostalgic vision of Italian Renaissance and French eighteenth-century gardens.3 That is not to say that all women who collected historic objects maintained a balance between the drenching play of memory and modern life or used the knowledge they gained to improve the lot of their fellow human beings. The antifeminist backlash that followed the vigorous campaign for women’s rights recast the American woman as the stabilizing force of the family and sent many former activists into seclusion.4 Thus it is unsurprising that less forceful women were overwhelmed by pontificators who celebrated femininity as a restorative haven from the pressures of modern life and designated woman as caretaker, custodian, and curator of the home. Rita Felski terms this woman-centered impulse “romantic nostalgia,” asserting that “woman came to stand for a more natural past connected with the lost rhythms of a preindustrial organic society” and “embodied a sphere of atemporal authenticity seemingly untouched by the alienation and fragmentation of modern life.”5 Persuaded by this line of reasoning, numerous women turned inward and refocused their attention on the home. Dealers such as Sir Joseph Duveen capitalized on the trend by encouraging wealthy female clients to perceive themselves as inheritors of a matrilineal tradition of aristocratic consumption initiated by Madame de Pompadour, Marie Antoinette, Empress Josephine, and Catherine the Great. While some wistfully nostalgic female collectors were content with creating fantasies of eighteenth-century court life and surrounding themselves with antiques and canvases redolent with associations of bygone languor, other more enterprising women transformed their daydreams into reality. Both Edith Rockefeller McCormick and Mary Hopkins Emery conceived model communities where ordinary people could own property and nourish the creative skills that were devalued by technological modernism. McCormick’s Edithton Beach, on the shores of Lake Michigan, and Emery’s Mariemont, on the outskirts of Cincinnati, were progressive ventures that stood in counterpoint to the nostalgic thrust of their personal art collections. Yet both their private and public projects represent a similar longing for an ideal home that would replace the impersonal metropolis with the intimacy of village life. T. Jackson Lears contends that modernism and antimodernism share cultural roots in

207

80. Friedrich August Kaulbach, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, 1908, oil on canvas, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

that both seek authentic experiences in order to repair personal identities fragmented in the march to progress.6 McCormick’s and Emery’s modernist nostalgia was a healing impulse that bridged the gap between nature and culture and between authenticity of feeling and faceless technology. Few women in the Progressive Era possessed the same degree of wealth as America’s richest men. Edith Rockefeller McCormick was an exception. The wealthiest woman in the United States in the 1920s, McCormick was the beneficiary of a trust fund teeming with Standard Oil stock endowed by her father, John Rockefeller Sr. Guaranteed an annual allowance of $350,000 (equivalent to almost ten times that amount today), in addition to other income, she was in the enviable position of possessing enough economic capital to pursue more intangible forms of psychological and cultural capital.7 Like the other elite women in this study, McCormick provides a larger-than-life framework for analyzing and testing the barriers all women experienced, and thus her actions suggest solutions that could be adopted on a more modest scale. Despite her wealth, McCormick did not hold herself aloof. She was remarkably frank in a series of newspaper interviews, and these, combined with correspondence and archival documents, reveal that she was at the crossroads of modernism and nostalgia. She was in the vanguard in seeking individual stability through psychoanalysis, condoning divorce, and supporting women’s equality, but she nostalgically valued the principle of community, women’s role as nurturers, the visual arts of previous eras, and the power of dreams to eªect change. Given the range of her commitments, it is no surprise that they were sometimes in conflict, most notably when she attempted to justify her extravagant spending habits during the depth of the Depression. In Friedrich August Kaulbach’s portrait of her at the age of thirty-six, in 1908 (fig. 80), she posed, clearly at ease, in a jeweled tiara, diamond necklace, ostrich wrap, and exquisite lace-trimmed gown. Unrepentantly regal, McCormick spent vast amounts of money on herself throughout her life. When asked by a newspaper reporter in 1932 how she could possibly wear magnificent clothes and jewelry at a time when she knew there was so much poverty in the world, she rationalized her behavior at length: The answer is so obvious I am almost embarrassed to make it when a person with even the simplest knowledge of economics must know that by so doing the woman of wealth is only doing her duty. In fact she is doing a double duty, for service to beauty is an obligation every one must perform if he has the slightest equipment of intellect and understanding of how to make the world a better place to live in through some act of his. . . . When I buy lovely, fragile laces I give employment to delicate frail little hands that might find no other means of self-support. My linens are made by the thriftiest folk, but folk who but for me and others who can aªord to buy expensive materials would find no market for their labor. . . . The same theory also applies to furs and jewels. . . . Rather than feeling selfish in indulging any expensive tastes which I have cultivated, I have, on the contrary, felt always a glow of satisfaction in being able to satisfy my own artistic cravings and at the same time allow others to share in the advantages of my wealth.8

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

•

209

McCormick’s defense is grounded in a classical theory of political economy that forms the basis of laissez-faire capitalism. Adam Smith, in his Wealth of Nations (1752), argued that spending and luxury were essential to the material progress of society for the same reasons that McCormick enumerates: to allow money to trickle down to the lower classes. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe had presented a similar argument in their book The American Woman’s Home (1869), where they insisted that “the use of superfluities” was “indispensable” to the promotion of industry.9 Although she never attended university, McCormick was extraordinarily well read in a wide variety of fields. She confided: “Wanting to be a scholar will not make me one, but reading has always been more important to me than eating.” According to Dr. Samuel Melamed, who surveyed her fifteen-thousand-volume library, McCormick made copious marginal notes in books dealing with sociology, psychology, philosophy, ethics, epistemology, and comparative religion.10 Despite her a‹nity for abstract thought, McCormick nonetheless strove to succeed in the quotidian marketplace, where her father had risen to such heights. Unfortunately, as Clarice Stasz notes in her insightful biography of the Rockefeller women, McCormick was prevented from exercising her intelligence due to family and social strictures. Stasz perceptively observes: “There was no place in Standard Oil for a multilingual, philosophy-reading, cello virtuoso in skirts.”11 Determined to prove herself to her father, McCormick attempted to found a factory specializing in a chemical treatment to strengthen wood used in railway ties and construction beams. Although the experiment proved unsuccessful, she persisted in holding her ideals of possessive individualism and convergence in an uneasy balance, saying: “Individualism of the highest type must be expressed by every man and woman and this can never be accomplished unless the heart and the soul are at peace.”12 To achieve that peace, she turned to therapy. McCormick had a long history of neurological and therapeutic treatment, beginning at the age of twenty-one when Dr. Silas Weir Mitchell diagnosed her as anorexic. He prescribed the rest cure he had developed for his treatment of neurasthenics, which was trenchantly described by another of his patients, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, in her claustrophobic novella The Yellow Wallpaper. Although Edith’s brother John Rockefeller Jr. also suªered from this ailment, the remedy prescribed for him and other males was vigorous physical exercise.13 This gendered treatment was based on the contemporary assumption that women were more sensitive, emotional, and “aªectable” than men.14 Encouraged by her family to be passive and invisible, McCormick followed the route paved by the previous generation of restless rich women and lavishly decorated the Chicago mansion that was her father’s wedding present when she married Harold Fowler McCormick in 1895. McCormick’s forty-four-room mansion at 1000 Lake Shore Drive rivaled Bertha Honoré Palmer’s Chicago residence, The Castle, in opulence. The two women were often compared because of their palatial homes, patronage of art and music, and involvement in world’s fairs. (The imposing gates surrounding McCormick’s turreted house were a gift from Kaiser Wilhelm to the German exhibit at the World’s Columbian Exposition; fig. 81.)15

210

•

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

81. Edith Rockefeller McCormick residence, Chicago, n.d. Photo: Chicago History Museum ICHi-01241.

While McCormick was uninterested in contemporary painters, preferring Rococo tapestries, old English silver, Aubusson carpets, and objets d’art patinaed with age, her taste, like Palmer’s, was gendered. McCormick embraced both male and female role models when she decorated an Empire room in her home dedicated to artifacts belonging to Napoleon and also re-created a Marie Antoinette bedroom with delicate floral patterns covering every surface (fig. 82). There she could practice the calm contemplation advocated by Dr. Mitchell and escape the judgment of her family as well as the dull routine of daily life. McCormick’s fascination with the ill-fated French queen links her to those nostalgically romantic women collectors who suªered from anomie and were similarly disenchanted with modernity. Several privileged American women formed a virtual cult dedicated to Marie Antoinette in the 1920s and 1930s. Maysie Gasque Parson created a Marie Antoinette bedroom and music room in her fifty-three-room house, Shadow Lawn, on the Jersey shore, and Anna Thomson Dodge displayed a jeweled coªer that had reputedly belonged to the queen in her home in Grosse Point, Michigan, which she built in imitation of the Petit Trianon. Other objects said to have been in the possession of the French queen adorned the homes

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

•

211

82. Marie Antoinette room, Edith Rockefeller McCormick residence, Chicago, n.d. Photo: Chicago History Museum ICHi-51020.

of Marjorie Merriweather Post and Eva Roberts Stotesbury.16 The cult of Marie Antoinette culminated in 1938 when Hollywood made a movie about her life starring Norma Shearer, who, as a result, became something of a cult figure herself. How can one account for this obsession with Marie Antoinette? Art historian Gabriel Weisberg argues that rich women wanted to establish an aristocratic lineage by bringing back the splendor of eighteenth-century court life to play up their status and justify their position as social leaders.17 The historian Anne Barstow contends that it is the death and not the life of female martyrs that transforms them into cult figures because Western necrophiliac culture demands that heroines, like Joan of Arc, must die an early and sacrificial death. Furthermore, according to Terry Castle, Marie Antoinette has been a lesbian cult object for many years, having been transformed into a homoerotic icon in novels such as Radclyªe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928), Antonia White’s Frost in May (1933), and Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood (1936). Castle oªers a broader rationale for this fascination with a “psychic old regime” that could also apply to the heterosexual women who were attracted to Marie Antoinette. She cites Freud’s essay “Family Romances” (1909), in which he attributes the fantasy of being descended from royalty to adults who, as children, felt slighted by their parents and theorizes that it is a form of symbolic wish fulfillment. Marie Antoinette,

212

•

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

then, represented an idealized maternal substitute. Castle concludes that “finding a new mother in Marie Antoinette was in turn a way of retaliating against powerful yet impervious fathers.”18 This analysis has particular resonance in terms of McCormick’s relationship with John Rockefeller Sr., whom she accused of throwing up “outside barriers” to protect himself emotionally and favoring her brother John over her.19 She compensated for her father’s lack of aªection by escaping into a dream world. McCormick’s fantasies were legitimated after she left America in 1913 for Switzerland, where she undertook analysis—and went on to train as an analyst herself—with Carl Jung. Jung validated her propensity for romanticizing the past and encouraged her to explore her psyche by examining her dreams in tandem with history and mythology. He maintained that the visual images that appeared in dreams were manifestations of archetypes and symbols that synchronously aªected the conscious and unconscious minds.20 According to Jungian philosophy: After a fantasy has been fixed in some specific form, it must be examined both intellectually and ethically, with an evaluating feeling reaction. And it is essential to regard it as being absolutely real; there must be no lurking doubt that this is “only a fantasy.” If this is practiced with devotion over a long period, the process of individuation gradually becomes the single reality and can unfold in its true form.21

Jungian analysis, in other words, validated McCormick’s dreams and daydreaming as crucial experiences in her maturation process. For her and countless other women like her who had been discounted because of their listlessness and lack of focus, this recognition of the capability of waking dreams that lingered like fumes in their art-filled rooms authenticated the aesthetic labor they had invested in gathering art objects that would aid them in discovering themselves. Interior space, to Jung, was an extension of the self, and unlike Freud, he considered works of art an integral part of the psychic process. In Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, he compared the psyche to rooms in a house. Describing one of his own dreams, in which he passed through richly furnished rooms decorated with paintings and art objects, he observed: “It was plain to me that the house represented a kind of image of the psyche— that is to say, of my then state of consciousness, with hitherto unconscious additions. Consciousness was represented by the salon.”22 In the actual process of building his own home, Jung reported, he discovered that the environment he had created represented a “concretization of the individuation process” and “a symbol of psychic wholeness.”23 On her return to Chicago after eight years in Zurich, McCormick not only established her own psychoanalytic practice, but also had two further goals: to establish a psychoanalytic center, and to produce aªordable housing for working people in a creative community where they could lead well-balanced lives. Both projects evolved from the Jungian equation between the psyche and material space. To that end, she resolved to re-create in Lake Forest, Illinois, the Psychological Club she had financed for Jung in

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

•

213

83. Interior courtyard, Villa Turicum, Edith Rockefeller McCormick residence, Lake Forest, Illinois, 1933. Photo: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-51021; photographed by Frederick O. Bemm.

Zurich and to found a town and university on the outskirts of Chicago along the shores of Lake Michigan.24 McCormick planned to house the psychoanalytic center at Villa Turicum, the fortyfour-room Italianate mansion she had built in Lake Forest in 1912, just before she left for Europe. Torn between past and present, she had initially commissioned Frank Lloyd Wright to design the house, but after reviewing his plans had turned to the architect Charles Platt, who specialized in historical revival styles.25 Like Alva Smith Vanderbilt, McCormick included a teahouse pavilion, which she inscribed with the motto “To Repose,” designating it as a space for reflection. Also conducive to relaxation were the sounds of moving water throughout the estate, from the waves lapping the lakeshore to the murmuring cascades running through the garden designed by Edwin Krenn, a Swiss landscape architect whom McCormick met in Zurich while they were both Jung’s patients. The trickle of running water was continued by fountains in the interior of the villa, such as the shellshaped fount in the Pompeian courtyard (fig. 83). Seen in the background of this photograph, beyond the fountain, are a sculpture in a Greco-Roman style and a sarcophagus with carved lion heads, signifying, in Jung’s lexicon, the instinctual or primitive urge, which

214

•

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

is to be controlled.26 This peaceful classical setting was tailor-made as a meeting and relaxation place for the “analyzed people” McCormick wished to have around her. When she endowed the Psychological Club in Zurich, she had pronounced that her aim was to “tend and promote Analytical Psychology as pure psychology, as well as for medical and educational purposes, and for the entire sphere of the sciences of the mind.”27 Whereas McCormick conceived of Villa Turicum as a gathering place for a relatively select group of analysts and analysands, she had even greater ambitions for the ordinary people who would live in her suburban housing development. McCormick used the insight she had gained about herself and her position in the world to design a colony for working-class and middle-class people. She explained: “It is time we began to grow within us so that we will be so rich with good, so overflowing that the overflow will pick up our fallen brothers without any detriment to ourselves.”28 While her years in therapy convinced her of the need to shield herself, she also came to the realization that she must reach out and share her self-knowledge and wealth with others. Remarkably, Mary Emery reached a similar conclusion at the same time in Cincinnati. She announced her plans for Mariemont, a 420-acre suburban community for ten thousand people of all classes, in 1922. It is not clear if the two women were aware of each other’s plans. The only possible point of contact I have discovered is that they were both clients of Duveen, who encouraged their nostalgic taste for paintings and decorative arts of the past.29 But their nostalgia extended beyond art to the values underlying its production. Both women reached back in time to revive the premodern principles of community. Emery declared that her intention in founding Mariemont was “to produce a citizenry which will be more sane, sound and eªective because of more satisfactory conditions of environment and education; to improve the physical, mental and moral condition of humanity, and generally to advance charitable and benevolent objects.”30 Although she was twenty-eight years older than McCormick, far less rich, and uninterested in psychoanalysis, Emery shared her desire to rectify some of the wrongs wrought by modernism by reviving the simple pleasures of village life, such as maypole dancing during the May festival (fig. 84). The New York World-Telegram and Sun reported on December 21, 1923, that McCormick was “to provide homes for persons with limited means at a price within their reach.” To that end, she bought 178 acres in Highland Park, soon expanding her holdings into Wisconsin to include Edithton Beach, a 1,550-acre property in Kenosha County, fifty miles north of Chicago on Lake Michigan.31 To finance her projects, she formed the Edith Rockefeller McCormick Trust with $5.2 million in Standard Oil securities and entered into partnership with Edwin Krenn and his friend Edward Dato, who had previous experience in real estate management. Speculating on the viability of a woman undertaking such an ambitious project, the New York Herald pondered: “It will be interesting to learn how Mrs. McCormick’s ventures turn out and how well she is able to hold her own with the male real estate dealers of Chicago who have been accustomed to purely masculine competition.”32 That doubt was put to rest when some sixteen thousand people invested over

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

•

215

84. May festival, Mariemont, Ohio, 1930. Photo: Cincinnati Museum Center—Cincinnati Historical Society; photographed by Warren Wright Parks.

$28 million in the development she advertised as a “modern utopia.”33 McCormick shrewdly circumvented male marketing techniques by appealing to women investors. McCormick visibly supported women’s independence by serving on the board of directors of all four Women’s World’s Fairs held in Chicago from 1925 to 1928. Selected because she was considered “keenly intellectual,” she endorsed the fairs’ goal of helping women achieve economic equality by showcasing their occupational achievements.34 McCormick had earlier believed that a wife should sacrifice her ambitions for the sake of her husband’s, but after divorcing Harold McCormick in 1921 and developing her own career as an analyst, she had changed her tune.35 Impressed by the inroads women had made into the professions, McCormick targeted them as investors in a mass mailing sent out by her real estate company, which persuasively reasoned: “What thought, what idea, was emphasized by the recently held Women’s World’s Fair? Isn’t it this:—Woman has at last demonstrated her actual equality in the Professions, in Art, in Literature, in Business

216

•

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

85. Proposed National University Campus, Edithton Beach, Wisconsin. Photo: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

and in Finance.”36 Whether it was due to her marketing techniques or to the real estate boom of the 1920s, McCormick’s business enterprise at first prospered. Emboldened by the success of her real estate ventures, McCormick next developed a plan for a national university at Edithton Beach, alongside an extensive housing subdivision. Her underlying philosophy combined Jung’s mission of promoting “a system of education and spiritual guidance” with his belief that shelters were symbols of psychic wholeness.37 Her plans for the campus included an auditorium, an outdoor concert hall, an athletic stadium, gymnasiums for men and women, dormitories, a hotel, a golf course, and an airport (fig. 85). To this elaborate setting she hoped to entice America’s leading scholars to spend their summers engaged in Jungian-inspired study and conversation. The university’s prospectus elaborated on this strategy to stimulate “scholarship and mental e‹ciency” and to engineer “a conscious conformity of individuals to the cosmic reality of which they are parts”: The proposed National University Campus is a project designed to provide a national vacation center for the universities of the land. It is proposed as a common campus for as many American universities as would care to participate in the project. Amid especially pleasant surroundings, with rest and recreation in the outdoors as the chief attraction, it promises to be one of the most unique educational institutions of its kind in the world, bringing together men and women from the universities of the country. . . . The National University Campus will aim to produce an atmosphere conducive to a balanced education. The man who has a balanced education, above all others, can sit solidly at home and not suªer himself to be bullied by dogmas, heresies, kings, or empires; he becomes at once a citizen of every city in the land, and every country in the world. . . . Each University group, nay, each individual, after inhabiting this small educational universe where so much has transpired in so short a time, returns back to his own city, state or country with broader,

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

•

217

more wholesome and healthier views on life and life’s problems. . . . Progress and enlightenment in any community is in inverse ratio to its ignorance and provincialism.38

McCormick progressively adopted a worldview that superseded her needs as an individual and embraced the broader concerns of humanity. She grew from an introspective, passive matron who adhered to the Gilded Age’s ideals of refinement and domestic femininity into a crusader for human rights and world peace. As a measure of her commitment to placing the needs of others beyond her own, McCormick sold almost $1 million in jewels in 1932 to cover the loans of the low-income people who had bought property from her but were forced to default on their payments when they lost their jobs during the Depression. She was also willing to sell the nostalgic treasures that had brought her so much comfort in the years before she had completed her analysis.39 Like her sister-in-law Abby Rockefeller, McCormick discovered that art collecting was a route to self-discovery and empowerment and moved beyond self-absorption to public service, reaching a deeper level of social interconnectedness. But because McCormick’s ambitions were greater, she had further to fall. McCormick’s dreams for a national university failed to materialize for two reasons: the economic downturn caused by the Depression and her father’s and brother’s refusal to rescue her from debt.40 Edithton Beach went into foreclosure, and her property company entered into bankruptcy. Forced to sell her house at 1000 Lake Shore Drive in 1932, McCormick moved into the Drake Hotel and died from cancer a few months later. Although her male relatives dismissed her as an impractical idealist, her eªorts not only were applauded by the thousands of Chicagoans who attended her funeral, but also served to bolster the resolve of the legions of American women who set their sights beyond the home and worked to improve their communities during the Progressive Era. Of these Progressive Era women, Mabel Dodge and Marion Koogler McNay looked even further afield than their immediate communities, nostalgically seeking authenticity in Native American communal values. Dodge left New York in 1918 and immersed herself in the Pueblo culture of the Southwest, which she perceived as an uncorrupted alternative to what she dismissed as modern American “machinery and money-making and factories.”41 In contrast, the Native American kinship system, a‹nity with nature, and lack of interest in material goods represented to her “a fragment of early Greece, dreamlike, and mysterious.” According to Dodge, “the Pueblos, the Navajos, the Apaches do not need more than they have, therefore they do not need to compete, they need only to give and to share. This is the essential communal spirit, travestied by us.”42 In Taos, she attempted to throw oª the shackles of Western possessive individualism and lose herself in the timeless rhythms of the Native American community by marrying a Pueblo Indian, wearing Native American dress, and participating in tribal ceremonies. She explained: “I thought perhaps the only way to go free is to live as a group, and to be part and parcel of a living tribal organism, to share everything, joy, pain, food, land, life and

218

•

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

death and so lose the individual anguish and hunger.”43 She contributed to the community by sharing her expertise as an art patron and political activist: she collected the works of local artists, advised them on marketing strategies, and defended tribal rights. McNay, whose will would set aside her art collection, her mansion, and an endowment for the establishment of a modern art museum in San Antonio, shared Dodge’s enchantment with the utopian model oªered by Pueblo culture after she began spending summers in Taos in the late 1920s. She admired the Pueblos’ lack of “guile” and their “deeprooted conviction” and carefully studied their culture and traditions, which she documented in a series of watercolor paintings.44 Like Dodge, McNay adopted Native dress and supported Pueblo artists by collecting numerous works of art, including the ceramics of Maria Martinez, as well as blankets and silver designed by contemporary artists. Beyond her art patronage, McNay vigorously opposed a congressional bill that endorsed the construction of dams on the Rio Grande River, which would have demolished Pueblo shrines and sacred sites. Also like Dodge, McNay met and married one of her husbands (her fifth) in Taos, the artist Victor Higgins, perhaps under the illusion that the spirituality of the place inspired its residents to become better human beings. But reality intervened in their relationship. Higgins complained: “Money is [Marion’s] weapon, she rewards and punishes with it.”45 Protective of her fortune and unwilling to relinquish her independence, McNay divorced Higgins and abandoned Taos, along with the chimera of an Edenic lifestyle that could replace desiccated bourgeois culture. Dodge, too, was rudely restored to twentieth-century reality by the proximity of the atomic bomb to her earthly paradise. In 1946 she bemoaned that “up on The Hill . . . earnest scientists labor on the contraption that may put an end to all these vestigial survivals.”46 Nostalgia oªered modern women like Dodge and McNay escapism rather than recovery. Like those eighteenth-century connoisseurs who went out into nature wearing yellow-tinted eyeglasses to make the landscape resemble the idylls seen through the aged varnish on Claude Lorrain’s canvases, McNay and Dodge arrived in the Southwest with a preconceived vision. They unrealistically expected to find a panacea for modern ills, unaware that the infectious strain they carried with them would inevitably contaminate their golden dream. As Frederic Jameson observes, such nostalgic yearnings involve a degradation of memory through the recycling of an artificial past.47 Nonetheless, Herculean eªorts like McCormick’s and Emery’s building schemes and Dodge’s fantasy about founding a new American civilization were necessary in the 1920s and 1930s if there was any hope for achieving a balanced society and countering the resistance to women’s growing independence. Enormous pressure was placed on females to return to home and hearth during this period. In response to Chicago’s liberating Women’s World’s Fair of 1925, one newspaper smugly pontificated that “newly emancipated women can and will do other things, but she will not release her hold on the home. And the masculine rejoices mightily in her decision.”48 Given a reprieve during World War II when the workplace beckoned, women

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

•

219

were shunted back into the home immediately afterward to be replaced by military veterans. The artist Louise Bourgeois lamented the extent to which women’s identity was inextricably linked with the domestic in her Femme Maison series of 1945–47, which illustrates the fusion between the female body and the house (fig. 86). Despite the advances that women have made professionally, women’s identity is still linked to the home. Contemporary authors continue to identify female characters in relation to the domestic. The writer Toni Morrison confesses to playing out her socially prescribed role in the home, admitting: “Sometimes my relationship to things in a house would be a little diªerent from, say my brother’s or my father’s or my sons’, I clean them and I move them and I do very intimate things ‘in place.’ . . . living in a small definite place, is probably very common among most women anyway.”49 The intimate relationship to things that Morrison describes has been a constant element in women’s lives from the post-Revolutionary period to the present. Although women today have more choices, even those with successful careers, like Morrison, draw their strength from the home and their special relationship with objects. Women collectors also continue to acknowledge that art is a source of empowerment. Lydia Malbin, for instance, states that collecting gives her the opportunity to make her own decisions and to achieve an “inner authority.”50 Another contemporary patron, Marieluise Hessel, recently explained why she finds comfort and security in art: Art only gives. . . . All you need to do is think about it and get in touch with your feelings as you look at it. It doesn’t require anything, unlike when you are with human beings.51

Collecting and patronage continue to give women an entrée into the public sphere and a venue for the shaping of culture. The alliance between art and activism also remains vibrant through arts organizations, which have kept alive the spirit sparked by Progressive Era women. In addition to providing breeding grounds for civic crusades and an infrastructure for the feminist movement that erupted in the 1960s, these associations are continually revitalized by art world protest groups, ranging from the Guerrilla Girls to AIDS activists.52 As the baton passes from one generation to the next, it remains clear that objects are still sources of empowerment and art is not a luxury, but a necessity.

220

•

E P I L O G U E : M O D E R N I S T N O S TA L G I A

86. Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, c. 1945–47, oil and ink on linen, Collection of Agnes Gund, New York. Photo: Eeva Inkeri; courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

Notes

All translations from the French are by the author unless otherwise noted.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

1.

Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 29 and passim. See also my “Pre-Raphaelite Women Collectors and the Female Gaze,” Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 5 (Spring 1996), 42–52; reprinted in Collecting the Pre-Raphaelites: The Anglo-American Enchantment, ed. Margaretta Frederick Watson (London: Ashgate Press, 1997), 109–20.

INTRODUCTION: WOMEN ART COLLECTORS

Mrs. John O’Connor, quoted in “Report on the Chicago Society of Arts and Crafts,” Handicraft, 3 (August 1910), 184, cited in Eileen Boris, “Crossing Boundaries: The Gendered Meaning of the Arts and Crafts,” in The Ideal Home 1900–1920: The History of TwentiethCentury American Craft, ed. Janet Kardon (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1993), 34. 2. See Frederick Baekeland, “Psychological Aspects of Art Collecting,” Psychiatry, 44 (February 1981), 45–59; Baekeland, “The Art Collector: Clues to a Character Profile,” New York Times, 16 September 1984; Hiram W. Woodward, Jr., “Acquisition,” Critical Inquiry, 6 (Winter 1979), 291–303; Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981); Paul H. Ackerman, “On Collecting—A Psychoanalytic View,” Maine Antique Digest, 18:5 (May 1990), 22A–23A; Ruth Formanek, “Why They Collect: Collectors Reveal Their

1.

223

Motivations,” in “To Have Possession: A Handbook on Ownership and Property,” ed. F. W. Rudman, special issue, Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6 (1991), 275–86; and A. D. Olmsted, “Collecting: Leisure, Investment or Obsession,” Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6 (1991), 287–306. The historian and archaeologist Susan Pearce has published numerous works, including Objects of Knowledge (London: Athlone, 1990); Museums, Objects and Collections: A Cultural Study (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1992); (as editor) Interpreting Objects and Collections (London: Routledge, 1994); On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1995); and Collecting in Contemporary Practice (London: Sage, 1997). For a useful summary of the interdisciplinary interest in collecting, see Brenda Danet and Tamara Katriel, “No Two Alike,” Play and Culture, 2 (1989), 254–55. 3. In the area of consumer research, see Russell W. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society (London: Routledge, 1995); Russell Belk and Melanie Wallendorf, “‘Of Mice and Men’: Gender Identity in Collecting,” in The Material Culture of Gender / The Gender of Material Culture, ed. Katharine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997); and Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989). In American studies, see Beverly Gordon, “Intimacy and Objects: A Proxemic Analysis of Gender-Based Response to the Material World,” in Material Culture of Gender, ed. Martinez and Ames, 237–52; “Gendered Spaces and Aesthetics,” ed. Katherine C. Grier, special issue, Winterthur Portfolio, 31 (Winter 1996); and Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery, 1850–1930 (Rochester, NY: Strong Museum, 1988). Studies by historians include Karen Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), and Kathleen D. McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991). The growing interest in this subject was evident in the interdisciplinary presentations delivered at the conference “Women Patrons and Collectors: Past and Present,” held at the New York Public Library, 18–20 March 1999, which resulted in the launching of the journal Aurora in 2000, edited by Lilian Zirpolo and Joanna Gardner-Huggett. 4. Charlotte Gere and Marina Vaizey also adopted a biographical approach in Great Women Collectors (London: Philip Wilson, 1999), reaching from Catherine the Great to Dominique de Menil. See also two pertinent collections of essays, “Cultural Leadership in America: Art Matronage and Patronage,” special issue, Fenway Court, 27 (1994), and the proceedings of a conference at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, Before Peggy Guggenheim: American Women Art Collectors, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Venice: Marsilio Editori, 2001). There are no recent books devoted solely to issues in American collecting. Earlier studies include Earl Shinn [Edward Strahan], The Art Treasures of America, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Gebbie and Barrie, 1879–82; repr., New York: Garland, 1977); Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections, ed. John La Farge and August F. Jaccaci, 2 vols. (New York: A. F. Jaccaci, 1907; repr., New York: Garland, 1979); Russell Lynes, The Tastemakers (New York: Harper, 1954); Aline Saarinen, The Proud Possessors: The Lives, Times and Tastes of Some Adventurous American Art Collectors (New York: Random House, 1958); W. G. Con-

224

•

NOTES

5. 6.

7. 8. 9. 10.

11.

12.

13. 14.

stable, Art Collecting in the United States of America (New York: Nelson, 1964); and Lillian Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966). Jules Prown, “Mind in Matter: An Introduction to Material Culture Theory and Method,” Winterthur Portfolio, 17 (Spring 1982), 105. Nancy Rubin, American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post (New York: Villard, 1995). Numerous books have been written about Guggenheim, including her own, Out of This Century: Confessions of an Art Addict (New York: Universe Books, 1946). For the most recent, see Karole P. B. Vail, Peggy Guggenheim: A Celebration (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 1998); Anton Gill, Peggy Guggenheim: The Life of an Art Addict (London: HarperCollins, 2001); and Mary Dearborn, Mistress of Modernism: The Life of Peggy Guggenheim (New York: Houghton Mi›in, 2004). Candace Wheeler, “The Philosophy of Beauty Applied to House Interiors,” in Household Art, ed. Candace Wheeler (New York: Harper, 1893), 3. Julia Cooley Altrocchi, for example, chronicles San Francisco’s high life in The Spectacular San Franciscans (New York: Dutton, 1949). The Sun, 14 February 1886. See Jackson Lears, Fables of Abundance: A Cultural History of Advertising in America (New York: Basic Books, 1994), and Sarah Burns, “The Price of Beauty: Art, Commerce, and the Late Nineteenth-Century American Studio Interior,” in American Iconology, ed. David C. Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 229–31. Lois Rudnick, “The Male-Identified Woman and Other Anxieties: The Life of Mabel Dodge Luhan,” in The Challenge of Feminist Biography, ed. Sara Alpert et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 126. Nancy A. Hewitt, “Beyond the Search for Sisterhood: American Women’s History in the 1980s,” Social History, 10:1 (October 1985), 303. The study of elites went out of favor in American scholarship after the historiographical turn in the 1960s. See Benjamin McArthur, “An Age of Excess,” Reviews in American History, 30:3 (2002), 406–12. Edith Rockefeller McCormick, interview with Mary Dougherty, “Life as It Seemed to Me,” New York Evening Journal, 2 September 1932. On the justification of luxury by political economists, see Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10–11, and Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed. Maxine Berg and Elizabeth Eger (New York: Palgrave, 2003). On McCormick, see Clarice Stasz, The Rockefeller Women: Dynasty of Piety, Privacy, and Service (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), and Stephen Birmingham, The Grandes Dames (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 125–51. See Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaªe, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon, 1963). Joan Wallach Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, 91 (December 1986), 1053–75. See also Nancy Cott, “On Men’s History and Women’s History,” in Meanings for Manhood: Constructions of Masculinity in Victorian America, ed. Mark C. Carnes and Clyde Griªen (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 205–11; and Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian

NOTES

•

225

15. 16.

17.

18. 19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25.

26.

America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 12. On gender and masculinities, see Michael Kimmel, Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 3–5. Michael Kimmel, “Introduction: The Power of Gender and the Gender of Power,” in Material Culture of Gender, ed. Martinez and Ames, 2. Jo Burr Margadant, The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 10. On other debates concerning the legitimacy of biography, see Erin O’Connor, “Reading The Biographer’s Tale,” Victorian Studies, 44 (Spring 2002), 379–87. On Meyer and Stieglitz, see Douglas K. S. Hyland, “Agnes Ernst Meyer, Patron of American Modernism,” American Art Journal, 12 (Winter 1980), 75–79. Regarding the transfer of responsibility at the Museum of Modern Art, see Abigail Rockefeller to A. Conger Goodyear, 23 March 1936, Alfred Barr Papers, microfilm reel 3064, Archives of American Art, and Christoph Grunenberg, “The Politics of Presentation: The Museum of Modern Art, New York,” in Art Apart: Art Institutions and Ideology Across England and North America, ed. Marcia Pointon (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1994), 192–211. Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary (Springfield, MA.: G. and C. Merriam, 1981), 218. John La Farge, Introduction, in Noteworthy Paintings in American Private Collections, ed. La Farge and Jaccaci, 1:xix. For subsequent views of collecting as a teleological process, see Joseph Alsop, The Rare Art Traditions (New York: Harper and Row, 1982), 70; Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1984), 151; and Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004), 120. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society, 64. Belk acknowledges that collections can be expressive of gender. See Belk and Wallendorf, “‘Of Mice and Men,’” 7–26. The setting is a room in a cottage on Appledore Island belonging to Hassam’s friend, the poet and china painter Celia Thaxter. See David Park Curry, Childe Hassam: An Island Garden Revisited (New York: Norton, 1990), 17. Kenneth L. Ames, “The Stuª of Everyday Life: American Decorative Arts and Household Furnishings,” in Material Culture: A Research Guide, ed. Thomas J. Schlereth (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1985), 85. See also Making the American Home: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Material Culture, 1840–1940, ed. Marilyn Ferris Motz and Pat Browne (Bowling Green, OH: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1988), 4, and Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloª, “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture,” in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 154. Wendy Steiner, The Trouble with Beauty (London: Heinemann, 2001), 57. On the debate over luxury, see John E. Crowley, “The Sensibility of Comfort,” American Historical Review, 104 (June 1999), 749–82. John Adams to Abigail Adams, 12 May 1780, in Adams Family Correspondence, ed. L. H. Butterfield and Marc Friedlaender, 6 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963–93), 3:342. See Benjamin Franklin to Lord Kames, 28 February 1768, in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, ed. Albert Henry Smyth, 10 vols. (New York: Macmillan, 1905–7), 5:107.

226

•

NOTES

27. 28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39.

Richard Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992), xviii. See Grier, Culture and Comfort; Crowley, “Sensibility of Comfort”; and Joyce Appleby, “Consumption in Early Modern Social Thought,” in Consumption and the World of Goods, ed. John Brewer and Roy Porter (London: Routledge, 1993), 162–73. See Catherine Kelly, “Gender and Class Formations in the Antebellum North,” and Susan Porter Benson, “Consumer Cultures,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy Hewitt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 113–14 and 274–94. Maud C. Cooke, Social Etiquette or Manners and Customs of Polite Society (London, Ontario: McDermid and Logan, 1896), 359. The book was simultaneously published in Philadelphia by Elliot Publishing. On collections as an extension of the self, see James Cliªord, “Collecting Ourselves,” in his The Predicament of Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press), 216–29. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003), 13. See also Thing Theory, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2004). Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society, 94. Claribel Cone, interview, Baltimore Sun, 15 April 1928. See Giles Waterfield, “Picture Hanging and Gallery Decoration,” in Palaces of Art: Art Galleries in Britain 1790–1990, ed. Giles Waterfield (London: Dulwich Picture Gallery, 1991), 49. Very little art historical research exists on the history of display in the United States prior to the twentieth century, when professional practices were introduced in American museums. See Martha Ward, “What’s Important about the History of Modern Art Exhibitions?” in Thinking about Exhibitions, ed. Reesa Greenberg, Bruce W. Ferguson, and Sandy Nairne (London: Routledge, 1996), 452. Victoria Newhouse has noted that major American museums did not have professional staªs devoted to exhibition design until the late 1960s; see her Art and the Power of Placement (New York: Monacelli, 2005), 24. On Vanderbilt’s gallery, see Earl Shinn, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, 10 vols. (Boston: George Barrie, 1883–84); S.G.W. Benjamin, “An American Palace,” Magazine of Art, 6 (1983), 137–43; and Arnold Lewis, James Turner, and Steven McQuillin, The Opulent Interiors of the Gilded Age: All 203 Photographs from “Artistic Houses” (New York: Dover, 1987), 22 and 118–19. Bjarne Rogan, “Collectionner—Mode Masculin et Mode Feminin,” in Mécènes et Collectionneurs: Les Variantes d’une Passion, ed. J.-Y. Ribault (Paris: Éditions du CTHS, 1999), 342. On the expansion of Hearst’s home, see Sara Holmes Boutelle, Julia Morgan, Architect (New York: Abbeville, 1995), 172–73. On the proliferation of private galleries, see Russell Lynes, More Than Meets the Eye: The History and Collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1981), 38, and H. Wayne Morgan, New Muses: Art in American Culture 1865–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 10. Belk and Wallendorf, “Gender Identity in Collecting,” 90. On the multifaceted motivations of male collectors, see Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society, 87–90, and Werner Muensterberger, Collecting: An Unruly Passion (Princeton,

NOTES

•

227

40.

41.

42.

43.

44.

45.

NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). The emulation of European models is discussed in Dianne H. Pilgrim, “Decorative Art: The Domestic Environment,” in Brooklyn Museum, American Renaissance, 1876–1917 (New York: Pantheon, 1979), 111–51. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 267–335. On the eªects of urbanization and industrialization on French males, see Deborah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 75–106, and Joyce Henri Robinson, “‘Hi Honey, I’m Home’: Weary (Neurasthenic) Businessmen and the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 98–112. See, for instance, Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (New York: Scribner’s, 1877); Jacob von Falke, Art in the House (Boston: L. Prang, 1879); and M. H. Baillie Scott, Houses and Gardens: Arts and Crafts Interiors (London: G. Newnes, 1906). On Whistler’s solo exhibition in New York in 1883, see Deanna Marohn Bendix, Diabolical Designs: Paintings, Interiors and Exhibitions of James McNeill Whistler (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 230. The influence of Morris and Crane is documented in Metropolitan Museum of Art, In Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: Rizzoli, 1986); Susan Casteras, English Pre-Raphaelitism and Its Reception in America in the Nineteenth Century (Rutherford, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1990); and Delaware Art Museum, Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 2004). On Wilde, see Mary Warner Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), and Jay E. Cantor, “Art and Industry: Reflections on the Role of the American Museum in Encouraging Innovation in the Decorative Arts,” in Technological Innovation and the Decorative Arts, ed. Ian M. G. Quimby and Polly Anne Earl (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1973), 333. On Avery, see chapter 2. On Chase, see Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr., “William Merritt Chase’s Tenth Street Studio,” Archives of American Art Journal, 16:2 (1976), 2–14. On artists’ studios as salesrooms pitched to women as cultural shoppers, see Linda Docherty, “Model Families: The Domesticated Studio Pictures of William Merritt Chase and Edmund C. Tarbell,” in Not at Home, ed. Reed, 48–49, and Burns, “Price of Beauty,” 209–38. See Simon Bronner, Introduction, and Jean-Christophe Agnew, “A House of Fiction: Domestic Interiors and the Commodity Aesthetic,” in Consuming Visions, ed. Bronner, 3–4 and 133–39. Women’s complicity in achieving social status is discussed in Leonore Davioª and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), and Leora Auslander, Taste and Power: Furnishing Modern France (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). On the situation in the United States, see Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in NineteenthCentury America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and Elizabeth FoxGenovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). See also Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005).

228

•

NOTES

46. William Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores,” Journal of American History, 71 (September 1984), 342. 47. On the rise of possessive individualism, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962), and Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 48. See Andrea Friedman, “The Politics of Consumption: Women and Consumer Culture,” Journal of Women’s History, 13:2 (2001), 159. Sources on women’s empowerment through consumption include The Sex of Things: Gender and Consumption in Historical Perspective, ed. Victoria de Grazia (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996); Mary Louise Roberts, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” American Historical Review, 103:3 (June 1998), 817–44; Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suªrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999); and Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). 49. Brown, Domestic Individualism, 47. 50. On “use value,” see A Dictionary of Marxist Thought, ed. Tom Bottomore et al. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 561. Stowe’s attitude toward luxury in her New York novels is discussed in Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Anchor Books, 1988), 66. 51. See R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 393. 52. Jean Baudrillard, For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis: Telos Press, 1981), and “The System of Collecting,” in The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal, trans. Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 7–24. 53. D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971; repr., London: Routledge, 1996), 14 and 100. I am grateful to my former colleague Dr. Janice Coco for bringing Winnicott to my attention and to my student Ann Baldoni for investigating the concept of play in her master’s thesis, “Sophisticated Play: The World According to Florine Stettheimer” (University of California, Davis, 2000). 54. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 51 and 54. 55. On Mary Sexton Morgan’s collecting as a form of play, see chapter 2. 56. Gertrude Bass Warner, “Friendly Relations,” typescript of address delivered at the University of Oregon in 1924, Special Collections, University of Oregon, Eugene. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1935), 2:238. Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (New York: Random House, 1993), 296–300. 57. The phrase is Cliªord Geertz’s. See his “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight,” in his The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 412–53. See also Diane Ackerman, Deep Play (New York: Random House, 1999). 58. Hans Loewald, “Psychoanalysis as an Art,” in his Papers on Psychoanalysis (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1980), 363. I am grateful to Scott Brennan-Smith for bringing Loewald to my attention. 59. Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories, 2:220.

NOTES

•

229

60. Craig Clunas, “Oriental Antiquities / Far Eastern Art,” in Formations of Colonial Modernity in East Asia, ed. Tani E. Barlow (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 416–17. 61. Charles Lamb, The Essays of Elia (1823), cited in Ann Eatwell, “Private Pleasure, Public Beneficence: Lady Charlotte Schreiber and Ceramic Collecting,” in Women in the Victorian Art World, ed. Clarissa Campbell Orr (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 128. 62. On Goncourt, see Rémy G. Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), xiv. Sarah Burns notes that Nordau’s Degeneration rose to number nine on the best-seller list in America in 1895; see her Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 81. 63. See Kathleen Pyne, “Portrait of a Collector as an Agnostic: Charles Lang Freer and Connoisseurship,” Art Bulletin, 78 (March 1996), 75–97. On the rise of male arts professionals, see Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, chapter 5. 64. See Macleod, “Eliza Bowen Jumel: Collecting and Cultural Politics in Early America,” Journal of the History of Collections, 13:1 (2001), 57–75. 65. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 13.

CHAPTER 1: THE POLITICS OF CULTURAL SPACE IN ANTEBELLUM AMERICA

1. James Cliªord, “Collecting Ourselves,” in Interpreting Objects and Collections, ed. Susan Pearce (London: Routledge, 2003), 260. 2. I am grateful to Eric Hormell of the Getty Provenance Index for bringing Eliza Bowen Jumel to my attention and to Joanna Pessa at the Morris-Jumel Mansion for granting me access to its archives. Part of my research was published in “Eliza Bowen Jumel: Collecting and Cultural Politics in Early America,” Journal of the History of Collections, 13:1 (2001), 57–75. For novels featuring Jumel, see, for instance, Leonard Falkner, Painted Lady, Eliza Jumel: Her Life and Times (New York: Dutton, 1962); Basil Beyea, The Golden Mistress (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1978); and Marianne Hancock, Madame of the Heights: The Story of a Prostitute’s Progress (Mt. Desert, ME: Windswept Publishers, 1998). She is also derided in William Henry Shelton’s monograph The Jumel Mansion (New York: Houghton Mi›in, 1916). For more balanced accounts of her life, see American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 12:317–18, and Constance M. Greiª, The Morris-Jumel Mansion: A Documentary History (Rocky Hill, NJ: Heritage Studies, 1995). 3. On the Columbian Gallery exhibition, see Rita Gottesman, “New York’s First Major Art Show as Reviewed by Its First Newspaper Critic in 1802 and 1803,” New-York Historical Society Quarterly, 43 (July 1959), 288–305, and Kenneth John Myers, “The Public Display of Art in New York City, 1664–1914,” in Rave Reviews: American Art and Its Critics, 1826–1925, ed. David B. Dearinger (New York: National Academy of Design, 2000), 33–34. For W. G. Constable’s remarks, see his Art Collecting in the United States of America: An Outline of History (London: Thomas Nelson, 1964), 11–20. Constable also names William Vernon, Richard Meade, Charles Russell Codman, and John Watkins Brett. Lillian Miller adds a few more names to this short list of early-nineteenth-century collectors of old

230

•

NOTES

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9.

10. 11.

12.

13.

14. 15. 16. 17.

masters, including John Murray of New York and Thomas Perkins, Harrison Otis, Peter Brooks, and Israel Thorndike of Boston. See Lillian Miller, Patrons and Patriotism: The Encouragement of the Fine Arts in the United States, 1790–1860 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966), 144–47. See Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Museum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000), 63–64. On possessive individualism, see C. B. Macpherson, The Political Theory of Possessive Individualism: Hobbes to Locke (New York: Oxford University Press, 1962); Joyce Appleby, Capitalism and a New Social Order: The Republican Vision of the 1790s (New York: New York University Press, 1984); and Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). Douglas and Elizabeth Rigby, Lock Stock and Barrel: The Story of Collecting (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1944), 326–27. See also Susan Pearce, “Engendering Collections,” in her On Collecting: An Investigation into Collecting in the European Tradition (London: Routledge, 1999), 197–222. Russell W. Belk, Collecting in a Consumer Society (London: Routledge, 1995), 97. See Carrie Rebora, “Robert Fulton’s Art Collection,” American Art Journal, 22 (1990), 41–63. See Joyce Henri Robinson, “An American Cabinet of Curiosities: Thomas Jeªerson’s ‘Indian Hall’ at Monticello,” in Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, ed. Leah Dilworth (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 16–41, and Susan R. Stein, “Jeªerson’s Museum at Monticello,” The Magazine Antiques, 144 (1993), 80–85. Paula Findlen, “The Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy,” Journal of the History of Collections, 1 (1989), 67–71. John K. Howat, “Private Collectors and Public Spirit: A Selective View,” in Art and the Empire City: New York, 1825–1861, ed. Catherine Hoover Voorsanger and John K. Howat (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2000), 83–84. See Catharine Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy, for the Use of Young Ladies at Home, and at School (1841; repr., New York: Harper, 1854); Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002); and Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1973). Tim Dolan, “Cranford and the Victorian Collection,” Victorian Studies, 36 (Winter 1993), 186. For Abigail Adams’s interest in the decorative arts, see her correspondence with Thomas Jeªerson, in The Papers of Thomas Jeªerson, ed. Julian P. Boyd and Charles Cullen, 27 vols. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1953–97), 8:547 and passim. Linda K. Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997), 216. Peale sketched the proposed exhibition layout in a letter to Fulton, 15 November 1807, reproduced in Rebora, “Robert Fulton’s Art Collection,” 57. Ann Parker, “Diary,” typed transcript, Jumel Papers, box 1, folder 14, New-York Historical Society. See Vicki Weiner, “The Jumel Wings,” unpublished research paper, 1990, MSS, MorrisJumel Mansion.

NOTES

•

231

18. Wayne Craven, “Introduction: Patronage and Collecting in America, 1800–1835,” in Ella M. Foshay, Mr. Luman Reed’s Picture Gallery: A Pioneer Collection of American Art (New York: Abrams in association with the New-York Historical Society, 1990), 11. 19. Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 160–61. The occupations of Eliza Bowen’s father and stepfather are unknown. 20. Ibid., 275. 21. Barbara Meil Hobson, Uneasy Virtue: The Politics of Prostitution and the American Reform Tradition (New York: Basic Books, 1987), 5. 22. Brief of Appellees, Supreme Court of the United States, No. 154, Bowen vs. Chase, cited in Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 160. 23. Christine Stansell, City of Women: Sex and Class in New York, 1789–1860 (New York: Knopf, 1986). 24. See Linda K. Kerber, “Can a Woman Be an Individual? The Discourse of Self-Reliance,” in Kerber, Toward an Intellectual History of Women, 200–223. 25. “Diary of William Dunlap (1796–1839): The Memoirs of a Dramatist, Theatrical Manager, Painter, Critic, Novelist, and Historian,” Collections of the New-York Historical Society, 62 (1929), xix; and 64 (1931), 796. 26. See John Vanderlyn to John Vanderlyn Jr., 26 April 1840, where the artist reports that Versailles had been rolled up after being used in Madame Jumel’s theater, cited in Salvatore Mondello, The Private Papers of John Vanderlyn (1775–1852), American Portrait Painter (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), 116. For an apocryphal account of Eliza Jumel and Saratoga Springs, see George Waller, Saratoga: Saga of an Impious Era (Englewood Cliªs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1966), 101–15. 27. Jo Burr Margadant, Introduction, in The New Biography: Performing Femininity in Nineteenth-Century France, ed. Margadant (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 2. I am grateful to Professor Margadant for allowing me to read her manuscript prior to publication. 28. David C. Ward, Charles Willson Peale: Art and Selfhood in the Early Republic (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 68. 29. For Stephen Jumel, see Dictionary of American Biography, ed. Allen Johnson et al., 23 vols. (New York: Scribner, 1928–58), 9:246–47, and Walter Barrett, The Old Merchants of New York City, 1st series, 2 vols. (New York: Carleton, 1844), 1:323–24. See also Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 162–73. 30. J. Parton, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr (New York: Mason Brothers, 1858), 661. 31. For the history of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, see Benson J. Lossing, “The Roger Morris House,” Appleton’s Journal, 10 (2 August 1873), 129–31; “The Jumel Mansion,” Harper’s Weekly, 10 June 1882, 357–58; Shelton, Jumel Mansion; and Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 155. Grieª notes that Stephen Jumel bought an additional twenty-nine acres in 1814. 32. Samuel Engle Burr, Jr., “Mrs. Aaron Burr’s Passport of 1853,” Autograph Collector’s Journal, 3 (1951), 4. 33. Elizabeth Monroe to Eliza Jumel, 2 June 1819, Monroe Papers, Library of Congress, cited in Walter A. Ostromecki, Jr., “The Elizabeth Monroe–Eliza Jumel Connection: The First

232

•

NOTES

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

43.

Lady Makes a Request,” Manuscripts, 44 (1992), 294. The Monroes were planning the construction of Oak Hill, in Loudon, Virginia; the house is privately owned today. Shelton, Jumel Mansion, 151. Hopper Striker Mott, The New York of Yesterday: A Descriptive Narrative of Old Bloomingdale (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1908), 89. Eliza Bowen Jumel to Stephen Jumel, n.d., Jumel Papers, Misc. MSS, New-York Historical Society, MSS typescript, Morris-Jumel Mansion. Shelton, Jumel Mansion, 168. In an undated letter to her husband, Eliza informed him that she had sought the advice of Chancellor Kent, from whom she learned that “if all the papers are destroyed, there is no future danger, and since they have not seized the property and because a rather long time has gone by since the aªair, that is proof that no one believes it.” Jumel Papers, Misc. MSS, New-York Historical Society; copy, Morris-Jumel Mansion. On Eliza Jumel’s power of attorney, see Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 200–203. For coverture and equity law, see Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), xiii and 13–14. See also Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in NineteenthCentury New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982), 225–27. Mary Bowne was not legally adopted by the Jumels. See Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 186. Ray Swick, quoted in Milton Lomask, Aaron Burr: The Conspiracy and Years of Exile 1805–1836 (New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1982), 401. The many conflicting interpretations of the Jumel-Burr marriage and divorce are summarized by Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 209–18. See also Nancy Isenberg, Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (New York: Viking, 2007). Suzanne Lebsock, The Free Women of Petersburg: Status and Culture in a Southern Town, 1784–1860 (New York: Norton, 1984), 234. See also Mary P. Ryan, Cradle of the Middle Class: The Family in Oneida County, New York, 1790–1865 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See, for instance, Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in NineteenthCentury America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), and Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983). C. G. Fontaine, Catalogue of Original Paintings, from Italian, Dutch, Flemish and French Masters of the Ancient and Modern Times, Selected by the Best Judges from Eminent Galleries in Europe, and Intended for a Private Gallery in America, to Be Sold at Madam Jumel’s Mansion-House, Harlem Heights, on the 24th April, 1821, Lots 1–242 (New York: C. G. Fontaine, 1821). Jumel bought in several paintings that reappear in the items that her grandniece, Eliza Chase Jumel Péry Caryl, lent to an exhibition in 1895; see St. Andrew’s Church, A Catalogue of the Loan Exhibit of the Valuable Jumel Collection of Napoleonic Relics and Other Historical Articles, Loaned for the Occasion by Mrs. Julius H. Caryl, December 30th, 1895 (New York: Women’s Guild of St. Andrew’s Church, 1895). Mrs. Caryl’s possessions were sold by her descendant Mrs J. Wade Hampton in 1916; see Silo’s Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, Catalogue of the Jumel Collection of Napoleonic Relics and Other Historical

NOTES

•

233

44.

45. 46. 47.

48.

49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

Articles Removed from the Famous Jumel Mansion, 546 Fifth Avenue, New York, March 31st and April 1st, 1916 (New York: Silo’s Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, 1916). American Academy of Fine Arts, Catalogue of Paintings, Statues, Busts, Drawings, Models, and Engravings Exhibited by the American Academy of Fine Arts, September 1, 1817, the Third Exhibition (New York: American Academy of Fine Arts, 1817). I am grateful to Martha H. Smart of the Connecticut Historical Society for making its contents available to me. Helen A. Cooper, John Trumbull: The Hand and Spirit of a Painter (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982), 11. John Pintard, Letters from John Pintard to His Daughter, 4 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1940–41), 2:31. Dorothy Carrington, “Cardinal Fesch, a Grand Collector,” Apollo, 86 (November 1967), 351. See also Dominique Thiébaut, Ajaccio, Musée Fesch: Les Primitifs Italiens (Paris: Éditions de la Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1987), and Michael Wynne, “Fesch Paintings in the National Gallery, Ireland,” Gazette des Beaux-Arts, 6:89 (January 1977), 1–8. John Trumbull, Autobiography: Reminiscences and Letters from 1756–1841 (New York: Wiley and Putnam, 1841), 255. Jumel arrived in France in July; Trumbull sailed home to the United States on 18 August. See Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 192. On Trumbull and Cosway, see Stephen Lloyd, Richard and Maria Cosway: Regency Artists of Taste and Fashion (Edinburgh: Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1995), 50, and Gerald Barnett, Richard and Maria Cosway: A Biography (Tiverton, U.K.: Lutterworth, 1995), 91 and passim. See John Walker, “Maria Cosway: An Undervalued Artist,” Apollo, 123 (May 1986), 318–24. She remained in contact with Fesch after he sponsored her in founding a school for girls in Lyon. On her tra‹cking in pictures, see Barnett, Richard and Maria Cosway, 161. Cosway’s relationship with Jeªerson is described in Jeªerson in Love: The Love Letters between Thomas Jeªerson and Maria Cosway, ed. John P. Kaminski (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1999). Barnett, Richard and Maria Cosway, 255, and Elena Cazzulani and Angelo Stroppa, Maria Hadfield Cosway (Lodi, Italy: L’Immagine, 1989), 45, 48–49. Catalogue de tableaux des trois écoles, statues, bustes, bas-reliefs et autres sculptures antiques . . . Le tout provenant d’ameublement de décoration de la maison de M.*** . . . Paris, le 17 de juin 1816 (Paris, 1816). I am grateful to Julia Armstrong at the Getty Provenance Index for providing me with a copy of this catalogue. See Constable, Art Collecting in the United States of America, 15. Constable notes that Peter Paul Rubens and Anthony van Dyck were exceptions to this rule. See E. Bénézit, Dictionnaire Critique et Documentaire des Peintres, Sculpteurs, Dessinateurs et Graveurs, 8 vols. (Paris: Librairie Gründ, 1948–55), 2:85 and 2:466. No. 87 in Fesch’s catalogue and no. 5 in the American Academy of Fine Arts catalogue. No. 47 in Fesch’s catalogue and no. 209 in the catalogue to Jumel’s 1821 sale. Michel Benisovich speculates that Jumel relied on dealers to assemble her collection. See his “Sales of French Collections of Paintings in the United States during the First Half of the Nineteenth Century,” Art Quarterly 19 (Autumn 1956), 289. “Le Brun,” Dictionary of Art, http://www.groveart.com, and Irma B. Jaªe, John Trumbull: Patriot Artist of the American Revolution (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1975), 172–73.

234

•

NOTES

58. William C. Preston, cited in Foster Rhea Dulles, Americans Abroad: Two Centuries of European Travel (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1964), 128. William Stowe also notes, “by the end of the Napoleonic Wars . . . a large number of newly rich, socially insecure Americans . . . used the trip to Europe to claim membership in a cultured upper class”; see his Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994), 6. 59. Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 175. 60. Among the several notes Eliza received in Paris from various female members of the Cubières family is an invitation to attend a theatrical performance under the patronage of the Duchesse de Berry; Adelede Cubières to Eliza Jumel, n.d., Jumel Papers, Mme. Stephen Jumel folder, New-York Historical Society. On the Marquise de Cubières and Jumel, see Mott, New York of Yesterday, 87. 61. Mary Jumel Bowne reported: “Mr. Jumel has purchased a beautiful house [in Dieppe]”; Mary Jumel Bowne to Mrs. Jones, n.d., Jumel Papers, Misc. MSS, New-York Historical Society. See also Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 195. The Dieppe address appears in a copy of an undated letter from Eliza to Stephen Jumel, Morris-Jumel Mansion. Two letters from the Duchesse de Berry to Eliza Bowen Jumel in Dieppe, dated 1825, appeared in her grandniece’s 1916 sale; see Silo’s Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, Catalogue of the Jumel Collection, nos. 99 and 130. 62. Baron d’Haussez, Memoires du Baron d’Haussez, Dernier Ministre de la Marine sous la Restauration, 2 vols. (Paris, 1896–97), 2:123. For the Duchesse de Berry, see Jo Burr Margadant, “The Duchesse de Berry and Royalist Political Culture in Postrevolutionary France,” in New Biography, ed. Margadant, 33–71; F. Bonnemaison, Galerie de son Altesse Royale Madame, Duchesse de Berry: École française, Peintres Modernes et Lithographies par d’Habiles Artistes, 2 vols. (Paris, 1828); Pierre Angrand, Le Comte de Forbin et le Louvre en 1819 (Paris: Bibliothèque des Arts, 1972); Francis Haskell, Rediscoveries in Art (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976), 26; and Palais Dobrée, Madame Duchesse de Berry (Nantes: Musées Départementaux de Loire-Atlantique, 1963). 63. Dictionnaire de Biographie Français, ed. J. Balteau et al., 13 vols. (Paris: Letouzey et Ane, 1933–93), 6:158. 64. Shelton, Jumel Mansion, 155, and Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 193–94. 65. See Julie K. Fix, “Elizabeth Kortright Monroe,” in American First Ladies, ed. Lewis L. Gould (New York: Routledge, 2001), 38. 66. Draft of a letter from Eliza Bowen Jumel to King Louis XVIII, reproduced in Shelton, Jumel Mansion, 163–64. On the thorny question of Stephen Jumel’s involvement with Napoleon, see Greiª, Morris-Jumel Mansion, 192–93. 67. H. Noel Williams, The Women Bonapartes (New York: Scribner’s, 1909), 110–11. 68. Empress Josephine to Eugène de Beauharnais, 24 February 1812, in Impératrice Joséphine Correspondance, 1782–1814, ed. Bernard Chevallier, M. Catinat, and C. Pincemaille (Paris: Éditions Payot et Rivages, 1996), 312. On Henri Tascher de la Pagerie, see The Titled Nobility of Europe, ed. Marquis of Ruvigny (London: Harrison, 1914), 1425. 69. Arnaud Chaªanjon, Histoires de familles royales: Impératrice Joséphine–Louis Philippe et leurs descendances de 1800 à nos jours (Paris: Ramsay, 1980), 23. 70. Napoleon Bonaparte to Prince Eugène Napoleon, 26 April 1810, in R. McNair Wilson,

NOTES

•

235

71. 72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

77. 78. 79.

80.

81. 82. 83.

The Empress Josephine: The Portrait of a Woman (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1932; repr., 1952), 258–59. St. Andrew’s Church, A Catalogue of the Loan Exhibit of the Valuable Jumel Collection, 11–13. Silo’s Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, Catalogue of the Jumel Collection, lots 355–58. In 1895 another Napoleonic relic from Jumel’s collection appeared in a sale at Christie’s: a pewtermounted leather army trunk, advertised as having been given to Madame Jumel by Napoleon via General Bertrand. The same object was oªered in Jumel’s grandniece’s sale in 1916 (purchased by the artist Mary MacMonnies Low). Christie’s, Napoleon, Nelson and Their Time: The Calvin Bullock Collection (London, 8 May 1895), lot 105, and Silo’s Fifth Avenue Art Galleries, Catalogue of the Jumel Collection, lot 275. On the American Academy of Fine Arts, see Theodore Sizer, “The American Academy of the Fine Arts,” in Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, American Academy of Fine Arts and American Art-Union, 2 vols. (New York: New-York Historical Society, 1953), 1:3–93; Miller, Patrons and Patriotism, 90–101; and Carrie Rebora, “The American Academy of Fine Arts, New York, 1802–1842” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1990). Sizer, “American Academy of Fine Arts,” 11–13. See Vanderlyn Papers, New-York Historical Society, and Willliam Townsend Oedel, “John Vanderlyn: French Neoclassicism and the Search for an American Art” (PhD diss., University of Delaware, 1981), 88. Oedel notes that Burr advised the artist to prepare by putting himself through a reading course of French authors, 43. See James B. Durand (who states that he is acting on behalf of Eliza Jumel) to Alexander Robertson, 23 August 1817, American Academy of Fine Arts Correspondence, NewYork Historical Society, 1:37. See Sellers, Market Revolution, 39 and 90, and Brown, Domestic Individualism, 2. “Review and Register of the Fine Arts,” American Monthly Magazine, 1 (1817), 456. On Smith, see Bénézit, Dictionnaire, 7:814. His identity as “Neutral Tint” was disclosed in Thomas S. Cummings, Historic Annals of the National Academy of Design (1865; repr., New York: Kennedy Galleries, 1969), 216. His reviews appeared in the New York Evening Post between 26 September and 9 October 1817. For the date of his arrival in New York, see Myers, “Public Display of Art in New York,” 35. The American Academy of Fine Arts minutes for 4 April 1818 state, in reference to the articles in the National Advocate: “These papers are understood to have been written by a person, once a member—expelled—and afterwards reinstated as an honorary member.” “Minutes of the American Academy of Fine Arts,” New-York Historical Society, 1:36. On Smith’s reaction to Vanderlyn, see Rebora, “American Academy of Fine Arts,” 128. Howard Mumford Jones, America and French Culture, 1750–1848 (1927; repr., Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1973), 570. Rebora, “American Academy of Fine Arts,” 351. Other factors contributed to the demise of the academy, including financial di‹culties caused by the directors’ decision to give Trumbull $10,000 for a group of his paintings and the commission of a portrait of Benjamin West by Thomas Lawrence, which did not bring in the expected number of paying visitors. On these and other problems, see Rebora, “American Academy of Fine Arts,” 261ª; Miller, Patrons and Patriotism, 97–101; and Sizer, “American Academy of Fine Arts,” 20–21.

236

•

NOTES

84. I am grateful to Jacqueline Letzer for providing me with her manuscript article “Rubens in America: The Role of an Exiled Art Collection in the Creation of a Belgian Cultural Consciousness (1794–1816).” On Calvert, see also Mistress of Riversdale: The Plantation Letters of Rosalie Stier Calvert 1795–1821, ed. Margaret Law Callcott (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991). 85. Port Folio, 5 (1811), 194–95, cited in Constable, Art Collecting in the United States of America, 102 (see 104 on Jeªerson’s copies). 86. E. B. Thorpe, “New York Artists Fifty Years Ago,” Appleton’s Journal of Literature, Science, and Art, 7 (25 May 1872), 572. On Paª, see Malcolm Goldstein, Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 6–13. 87. Martha J. Lamb, The Homes of America (New York: D. Appleton, 1879), 17. 88. The catalogue of Jumel’s exhibition at the American Academy of Fine Arts has been inexplicably omitted from the Early American Imprints series, thus its access to scholars is limited. See Early American Imprints, 2nd series, 1801–1819, ed. Cliªord K. Shipton (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1964). Jumel’s loans to the 1817 exhibition have been indexed by the New-York Historical Society, however; see Cowdrey, American Academy of Fine Arts. 89. See http://piedi.getty.edu. 90. American Academy of Fine Arts, Catalogue, no. 6. Alexandra R. Murphy, European Paintings in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1985), nos. 68.23 and 68.24. 91. See Franklin W. Robinson et al., Catalogue of the Flemish and Dutch Paintings 1400–1900 (Sarasota, FL: John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, 1980), no. 111, and Robert C. Smith, Jr., “The Brazilian Landscapes of Frans Post,” Art Quarterly, 1 (1938), 238–67. 92. Alexander R. Lawton, “Telfair Academy of Arts,” Georgia Historical Quarterly, 1 (March 1917), 14–15, and Telfair Academy of Arts and Sciences, Catalogue (Savannah: Georgia Historical Society, 1914), 7. 93. Colt was the longtime president of the Hartford Union for Home Work, which was founded to aid women and children through home visits and by providing a nursery for childcare. She also bequeathed her home as a residence for Episcopalian women. See William Hosley, Colt: The Making of an American Legend (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press; Hartford, CT: Wadsworth Atheneum, 1996), 212–14 and 226. Telfair funded the Telfair Hospital for Females and stipulated that its board of directors consist of women. See Charles J. Johnson, Jr., Mary Telfair: The Life and Legacy of a NineteenthCentury Woman (Savannah, GA: Frederic C. Beil, 2002), 6 and 391–92, and Tania June Sammons, “‘A Vital and Integral Part of Society’: Women Patrons of the Arts in the South,” Aurora, 4 (2003), 186. 94. Elizabeth Hart [ Jarvis] Colt, A Memorial of Mrs. Elizabeth Miller Jarvis (Hartford, CT: Case, Lockwood and Brainard, 1881); Hosley, Colt, 10 and 202. 95. Hosley, Colt, 6 and 157. 96. Samuel Colt had declined the opportunity to purchase a collection of old master paintings in 1861; see ibid., 143. 97. Ibid., 173, and Elizabeth Mankin Kornhauser, Hudson River School: Masterworks from the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), 3.

NOTES

•

237

98.

99. 100.

101.

102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107.

108.

109. 110. 1 1 1.

112.

On Belmont, see David Black, The King of Fifth Avenue: The Fortunes of August Belmont (New York: Dial, 1981), 240, and Howat, “Private Collectors and Public Spirit,” 105. On Johnston, see Ruth Krueger Meyer and Madeleine Fidell Beaufort, “The Rage for Collecting: Beyond Pittsburgh in the Gilded Age,” in Gabriel P. Weisberg, DeCourcy E. McIntosh, and Alison McQueen, Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 313, and Katharine Baetjer, “Extracts from the Paris Journal of John Taylor Johnston: First President of the Metropolitan Museum,” Apollo, 114 (December 1981), 410–17. Colt was also familiar with James Batterson’s collection of European art in Hartford, according to Hosley, Colt, 167. Hosley, Colt, 177–78. Ibid., 218–19. Hosley explains in note 46 that the three rival factions were spearheaded by William Cowper Prime, an art critic; J. P. Morgan, the financier and collector; and Timothy Allyn, a politician. Alan Wallach, “Col. Colt’s Ambiguous Legacy; or, When I Hear the Word ‘Revolver,’ I Reach for My Culture,” American Quarterly, 50:3 (1998), 609. See also Hosley, Colt, 224–25. Even so, the curators had to overcome opposition from some of their colleagues, one of whom characterized the collection as “of marginal interest . . . run-of-the mill Victorian taste . . . uninformed and ordinary”; see Hosley, Colt, 6. Hosley, Colt, 33. Nan Enstad, “Urban Spaces and Popular Cultures, 1890–1930,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 309. Mary Telfair to Mary Few, n.d., cited in Johnson, Telfair, 63 and 65. Ann Firor Scott, The Southern Lady: From Pedestal to Politics, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 4–7 and 19–20. Mary Telfair to Mary Few, n.d., cited in Tania June Sammons, “Telfair Women Patrons,” in Exposed! Telfair Women Artists and Patrons (Savannah: Telfair Museum of Art, 1996), unpaginated. On the education of Southern women, see Anna Jabour, “‘College Girls’: The Female Academy and Female Identity in the Old South,” in Lives Full of Struggle and Triumph: Southern Women, Their Institutions, and Their Communities, ed. Bruce L. Clayton and John A. Salmond (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2003), 74–92. Feay Shellman Coleman, “Mary Telfair (1791–1875): Nineteenth-Century Collector” (conference presentation, “Women Art Patrons and Collectors: Past and Present,” New York Public Library, 18–20 March 1999). Information provided by Beth Moore, Assistant Curator, Telfair Museum of Art, on 30 January 2006. Mary Telfair, cited in Johnson, Mary Telfair, 306. The italics are mine. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, 4th moment (1790), in Philosophies of Art and Beauty, ed. Albert Hofstader and Richard Kuhns (New York: Modern Library, 1964), 284. See also Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective, ed. Hilde Hein and C. Korsmeyer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 181. Mary Telfair to Mary Few, 25 November [1837], cited in Johnson, Mary Telfair, 128. On Gilmor, see The Taste of Maryland: Art Collecting in Maryland 1830–1934 (Baltimore: Wal-

238

•

NOTES

1 13.

114. 1 15. 116.

117.

118. 119. 120.

121. 122.

ters Art Gallery, 1984), 1–8, and Nathalia Wright, “Horatio Greenough, Boston Sculptor, and Robert Gilmor, Jr., His Baltimore Patron,” Maryland Historical Magazine, 51 (1956), 1–13. For Medora as an object of desire, see Joy Kasson, Marble Queens and Captives: Women in Nineteenth-Century American Sculpture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 111. Michael Camille, Introduction, in “Other Objects of Desire,” special issue, Art History, 24 (April 2001), 163–64. Telfair, cited in Johnson, Mary Telfair, 109. See Caroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 30–34; Nancy Cott, “Passionless: An Interpretation of Victorian Sexual Ideology, 1790–1850,” Signs, 4:2 (1978), 219–36; and Johnson, Mary Telfair, 110–11. LeeAnn Whites, “The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender,” in Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, ed. Catherine Clinton and Nina Silber (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 3–21. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 13. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly, 18 (Summer 1966), 152. See Mary Louise Roberts, “True Womanhood Revisited,” Journal of Women’s History, 14:1 (2002), 150–55, and Glenna Matthews, ‘Just a Housewife’: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Open University Press, 1987), 18–19. Karen Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 3. Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood,” 165.

CHAPTER 2: A CONSPIRACY OF SILENCE

1. 2.

3.

4. 5.

New York Sun, 14 February 1886 and 28 November 1885. New York Times, 14 February 1886. On Morgan’s sale, see American Art Association, Modern Paintings: Art Collections of the Late Mrs. Mary J. Morgan (New York, 3 March 1886); The Morgan Art Sale Porcelains and Pictures (New York: The Sun, 1886), a reprint of articles appearing in the New York Sun; Wesley Towner, The Elegant Auctioneers (New York: Hill and Wang, 1970), 80–114; and William R. Johnston, William and Henry Walters: The Reticent Collectors (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 95–99. See, for instance, Saul Zalesch, “Mary Jane Morgan,” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/morgan; and Robert Isaacson, William Adolphe Bouguereau (New York: New York Cultural Center, 1975), 26. Barbara Welter, “The Cult of True Womanhood: 1820–1860,” American Quarterly 18 (Summer 1966), 162. See Anne Firor Scott, Making the Invisible Woman Visible (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1984), 156; Peggy Phelan, Unmarked: The Power of Performance (London: Routledge, 1993); and Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 25.

NOTES

•

239

6. Beth Newman, Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004), 7. 7. Towner, Elegant Auctioneers, 84. 8. Norma Basch, In the Eyes of the Law: Women, Marriage, and Property in Nineteenth-Century New York (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1982). 9. James Schouler, A Treatise on the Law of the Domestic Relations (Boston: Little, Brown, 1870), 51, cited in Linda K. Kerber, No Constitutional Right to Be Ladies: Women and the Obligations of Citizenship (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 39. 10. Philadelphia Times, 21 February 1886. 1 1. William Schaus (1820–1892) emigrated to the United States from Germany in 1847 and first worked for Michael Knoedler. In 1852 he opened his own gallery at 204 Fifth Avenue, where he specialized in Barbizon School and old master paintings. See his obituary in the Collector, 4 (1 January 1893), 72; Malcolm Goldstein, Landscape with Figures: A History of Art Dealing in the United States (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 55–57; and Neil Harris, The Artist in American Society (New York: Braziller, 1966), 26. 12. New York Sun, 14 February 1886. 13. “The Rime of the Peachblow Vase,” New York Times, 27 March 1886. 14. Charles de Kay, “An American Gallery,” Magazine of Art, 9 (1885–86), 248–49. On de Kay, see Saul Zalesch, “Competition and Conflict in the New York Art World, 1874–1879,” Winterthur Portfolio, 29 (1994), 103–20. For de Kay’s unfinished manuscript “Under the Hammer,” see Auctions Records, Mary Jane Morgan file, 3–15 March 1886, American Art Association, box 4, Archives of American Art (hereafter AAA). 15. Sigmund Freud, “Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality,” in The Essentials of Psychoanalysis, ed. Anna Freud (London: Hogarth Press, 1986), 353–54. See also Aydan Gulerce, “Transitional Objects: A Reconsideration of the Phenomenon,” in “To Have Possession: A Handbook on Ownership and Property,” ed. F. W. Rudmin, special issue, Journal of Social Behavior and Personality, 6 (1991), 187. 16. See R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Association Books, 1991), 393, and Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Diªerence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995). 17. Daphne T. Nash, “The Art Collection of Mary Jane Morgan: A Document of Taste in Nineteenth-Century New York” (master’s thesis, Bard Graduate Center for Studies in the Decorative Arts, 1999). On fantasy and collecting, see Ruth Formanek, “Why They Collect: Collectors Reveal Their Motivations,” in To Have Possession, 277. 18. Sigmund Freud, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” (1908), in Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, ed. Anna Freud, 5 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 4:176. 19. On Whistler’s Lange Leizen as a model for Chase, see Roger B. Stein, “Artifact as Ideology: The Aesthetic Movement in Its American Cultural Context,” in The Pursuit of Beauty: Americans and the Aesthetic Movement (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1986), 41. On Dewing, see Susan A. Hobbs, The Art of Thomas Wilmer Dewing: Beauty Reconfigured (Brooklyn: Brooklyn Museum, 1986), 186. 20. See Brenda Danet and Tamar Katriel, “No Two Alike: Play and Aesthetics in Collecting,” Play and Culture, 2 (1989), 256, and Jean Baudrillard, “The System of Collecting,” in

240

•

NOTES

21. 22.

23.

24.

25. 26. 27.

28.

29. 30.

The Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Elsner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Art Amateur, 5 (October 1885), 88. Morgan owned Anna Jameson’s Legends of the Madonna (1853); Legends of the Monastic Orders (1850); two copies of Characteristics of Women, 2 vols. (1858); Visits and Sketches at Home and Abroad, 4 vols. (1840); Memoirs of Celebrated Female Sovereigns, 2 vols. (1840); Companion to the Public and Private Galleries in London, 3 vols. (1842–44); Commonplace Book of Thoughts, Memories, and Fancies (1854); Lives of the Poets, 2 vols. (1829); and Social Life in Germany, 2 vols. (1840). See American Art Association, Modern Paintings, lots 1510–12. Anna Jameson, Handbook to the Public Galleries of Art in and Near London (London: Longman and Brown, 1842), 300. Regarding male connoisseurs, Jameson quoted the eighteenth-century theoretician Jonathan Richardson, who cautioned: “A man may be a good connoisseur in general, and an ingenious man, and yet his judgment in many cases is not to be regarded.” Ibid., xli. Jameson, Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London (London: Saunders and Otley, 1844), 383. On Jameson and the decorative arts, see Kate Flint, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), 193. On the interior of the American home as a “memory palace” of associations, see Katherine Grier, Culture and Comfort: People, Parlors, and Upholstery 1850–1930 (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 15. Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 122. New York Times, 14 February and 1 March 1886. Morgan presumably bought them from Ryder’s dealer, Daniel Cottier. The paintings were Spring, Resurrection, and Woman and Staghound. See Elizabeth Broun, Albert Pinkham Ryder (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1989), 105, 127–28, 277–79, and 312–14. Detailed descriptions of the objects in Morgan’s collection are contained in a thirtytwo-page pamphlet published by the New York Sun, in which the paper’s articles about the sale of the collection are reprinted; see Morgan Art Sale, N-47, 1040–56. See also the illustrations and descriptions in American Art Association, Catalogue of the Art Collection Formed by the Late Mary J. Morgan (New York: J. J. Little, 1886), and American Art Galleries, Priced Catalogue of the Art Collections Formed by the Late Mrs. Mary J. Morgan (New York, 3, 4, 5, and 8 March 1886), Frick Art Reference Library. See Freud, “Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming,” 173–83, and Hinshelwood, Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 262–63. Among contemporary interpretations of imaginative play are Ellen Dissanayake, “A Hypothesis of the Evolution of Art from Play,” Leonardo, 7 (1974), 211–17; Gillian Brown, “Child’s Play,” Diªerences, 11:3 (October 1999), 76–87; and Diane Ackerman, Deep Play (New York: Random House, 1999). Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi and Eugene Rochberg-Halton, The Meaning of Things: Domestic Symbols and the Self (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 244. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (1795; repr., Oxford: Clarendon, 1967); Hinshelwood, Dictionary of Kleinian Thought, 264; and Johan Huizinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (London: Routledge and K. Paul, 1949).

NOTES

•

241

31. 32.

33. 34.

35. 36.

37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43.

44.

D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971; repr., London: Routledge, 1996), 64 and 109. “The Death of Mrs. Morgan,” undated clipping, Mary Jane Morgan clipping file, AAA. Unfortunately, none of the objects that are described in this article can be traced. The only extant record in the Tiªany & Company Archives is an invoice for the sale of a cut glass service to Mrs. Charles Morgan in 1885 totaling $18,000. I am grateful to Annamarie Sandecki, Director of the Tiªany Archives, for providing me with this information. On Charles and Henrietta Caswell Smith, see Arnold Lewis, James Turner, and Steven McQuillin, The Opulent Interiors of the Gilded Age (New York: Dover, 1987), 68–69. Charles Baudelaire, “A Philosophy of Toys,” in Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life (1859), trans. Jonathan Mayne (London: Phaidon, 1964), 199, and Clarence Cook, The House Beautiful (1877; repr., New York: Dover, 1995), 102. Cook, House Beautiful, 103. See Aesthetics in Feminist Perspective, ed. Hilde Hein and Carolyn Korsmeyer (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 181; Wendy Steiner, Venus in Exile: The Rejection of Beauty in Twentieth-Century Art (New York: Free Press, 2001), 57; and Women Artists and the Decorative Arts 1880–1935, ed. Bridget Elliott and Janice Helland (London: Ashgate, 2002). James Grant Wilson, “About Bric-à-Brac,” Art Journal, 39 (1878), 313–15. On this point, Russell Belk maintains that critics who used the term “bric-a-brac” instead of “objet d’art” charged it with an evaluative connotation that “delegitimizes the collector’s pursuit as one of indulgent pleasure rather than scientific or artistic merit”; see his Collecting in a Consumer Society (London: Routledge, 1995), 41. Charles Locke Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste (1868; repr., New York: Dover, 1986), 8. By 1881 six editions had been published in the United States. Tim Dolan, “Cranford and the Victorian Collection,” Victorian Studies, 36:2 (Winter 1993), 189. Earl Shinn [Edward Strahan], The Art Treasures of America, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Gebbie and Barrie, 1879–82; repr., New York: Garland, 1977), 2:14. Earl Shinn, A Book of the Tile Club (Boston: Houghton, Mi›in, 1887), 5–6. Georg Hegel, “On Art,” in On Art, Religion, and the History of Philosophy, ed. J. Glenn Gray (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997), 29. For a Hegelian reading of American culture, see David Carrier, Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Museums (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006). Erica Hirshler, “Claiming Our Property Wherever We Find It: American Art after 1865,” in America: The New World in Nineteenth-Century Painting, ed. Stephan Koja (New York: Prestel, 1999), 45–46; H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris for American Painters, 1850–1910 (Oklahoma City: Oklahoma City Museum of Art, 2003), 13; and H. Barbara Weinberg, The Lure of Paris: Nineteenth-Century American Painters and Their French Teachers (New York: Abbeville Press, 1991). Rémy G. Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 68. For Shinn’s biography, see Saul Zalesch, “Earl Shinn,” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/shinn.

242

•

NOTES

45.

46.

47.

48.

49. 50. 51.

52.

53.

54.

55. 56. 57. 58.

On Shinn as an apologist for French art, see Ruth Krueger Meyer and Madeleine Fidell Beaufort, “The Rage for Collecting: Beyond Pittsburgh in the Gilded Age,” in Gabriel P. Weisberg, DeCourcy E. McIntosh, and Alison McQueen, Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 315. The influence of Europe on American art has been a mainstay of art historical literature; see Wanda Corn, “Coming of Age: Historical Scholarship in American Art,” Art Bulletin, 70 (June 1988), 188–207. Earl Shinn, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection, 10 vols. (Boston: George Barrie, 1883–84), 1:vi. On American Reconstruction and its aftermath, see Robert H. Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967). Shinn, Art Treasures, 1:3–4. Shinn did not systematically cover collections from East to West in The Art Treasures of America, but frequently interrupted his narrative by returning to collections on the East Coast. See Sean Dennis Cashman, “Industrial Spring: America in the Gilded Age,” in Major Problems in the Gilded Age and the Progressive Era, ed. Leon Fink (New York: Houghton Mi›in, 2001), 3. Rozsika Parker and Griselda Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art, and Ideology (London: Routledge, 1981), 50 and 80. Montague Marks, “Rise of Art in the Household,” Art Amateur, 1:1 (June 1879), 1. On the gendering of geography, see Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 4. Elizabeth Langland, Nobody’s Angels: Middle-Class Women and Domestic Ideology in Victorian Culture (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 11 and passim. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002). See also Grier, Culture and Comfort, 6. See Philip S. Benjamin, The Philadelphia Quakers in the Industrial Age 1865–1920 (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976), 148–50, and Nancy Hewitt, “Feminist Friends: Agrarian Quakers and the Emergence of Woman’s Rights in America,” Feminist Studies, 12 (Spring 1986), 27–49. On Shinn’s Quaker background, see Zalesch, “Earl Shinn.” Jackson Lears, “Beyond Veblen: Rethinking Consumer Culture in America,” in Consuming Visions: Accumulation and Display of Goods in America, 1880–1920, ed. Simon J. Bronner (New York: W. W. Norton, 1989), 75. Shinn did not seem to have a close relationship with his publisher. On 2 November 1882 he confided to an unknown correspondent (“Ma Chérie”), “I am very uneasy about Barrie.” Microfilm reel 3580, AAA. Shinn to “Ma Chérie,” 2 November 1882, and Shinn to “Aunty [Polly],” 17 September 1886, microfilm reel 3580, AAA. Art Amateur, 16 December 1886, 3. H. Wayne Morgan, New Muses: Art in American Culture, 1865–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978). On Avery, see Madeleine Fidell Beaufort, Herbert Kleinfield, and Jeanne K. Welcher, The Diaries 1871–1882 of Samuel P. Avery, Art Dealer (New York: Arno Press, 1979); Madeleine

NOTES

•

243

59. 60.

61.

62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71.

Fidell Beaufort and Jeanne K. Welcher, “Some Views of Art Buying in New York in the 1870s and 1880s,” Oxford Art Journal, 5:1 (1982), 48–54; and “Samuel P. Avery,” http://www.groveart.com. “My Note-Book,” Art Amateur, 1 (June 1879), 3. Another explanation is that Avery may have resented Shinn’s selection by W. H. Vanderbilt to catalogue his vast collection. George Leavitt (1822–1885) was an art dealer and auctioneer. See George L. McKay, American Book Auction Catalogues, 1713–1914 (1937; repr., Detroit: Gale, 1967), 15–18. On Avery and Walters, see Beaufort and Welcher, “Some Views of Art Buying in New York,” 50. Beaufort, Kleinfield, and Welcher, Diaries 1871–1882 of Samuel P. Avery, xx. Avery sold numerous types of decorative art, including silver, jewelry, mirrors, vases, ceramics, and metalwork; see Diaries, xxxviii. See New York Tribune, 19 December 1876. Gerald Bolas, “The Early Years of the American Art Association, 1879–1900” (PhD diss., City University of New York, 1998), 160. Kirby was financially backed by James Sutton; see Goldstein, Landscape with Figures, 88. As I pointed out in the introduction to the present volume, artists also domesticated their studios to make them more inviting to female clients; see Linda Docherty, “Model-Families: The Domesticated Studio Pictures of William Merritt Chase and Edmund C. Tarbell,” in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thames and Hudson, 1996), 48–64. Martha Ward documents a similar trend among French artists and dealers in the 1870s and 1880s; see “Impressionist Installations and Private Exhibitions,” Art Bulletin, 73 (December 1991), 599–622. On Mary Stuart, see “A Fortune to the Public: Provisions of Mrs. Stuart’s Will,” New York Tribune, 6 January 1892, and Lewis, Turner, and McQuillin, Opulent Interiors, 103–105. Samuel Avery to Mary Morgan, 7 December [n.d.], Mary Morgan Papers, AAA. Jules Breton to Samuel Avery, [1886], Mary Morgan Papers, AAA. The painting is now in a private collection, on loan to Perth Museum and Art Gallery, Scotland. Avery to Morgan, 18 March 1884, Mary Morgan Papers, AAA. American Art Association, Modern Paintings, lot 1376. The twenty-two women are Anna Breck Aspinwall, Abigail Wheatley Blodgett, Elizabeth McKean Borie, Ellen White Colton, Mary Ann Deming Crocker, Isabella Richardson Dennison, Amanda Ruckman Fell, Sarah Poulterer Harrison, Phoebe Apperson Hearst, Sarah Hitchcock, Alice Sturgis Hooper, Catherine Birdsell Johnson, Mrs. A. E. Kidd, Louise Hungerford Mackay, Martha Reed Mitchell, Susan Endicott Roberts, Jane Kilgour Springer, Marietta Reed Stevens, Cornelia Clinch Stewart, Mrs. Russell Sturges, Anna Wilstach, and Catharine Lorillard Wolfe. Shinn also mentions Princess Louise, who was married to the Governor General of Canada, but I have excluded her from my analysis of American women. Pierre Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, trans. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), 102 and 99. Susan Roberts was the third wife of Marshall Roberts, a merchant and a founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, whom she met on a ship while returning to New York from Europe in 1877, when he was seventy years old. By that time, Roberts had already

244

•

NOTES

72.

73.

74.

75. 76. 77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

gathered together more than three hundred paintings, which he displayed in a private gallery in his home. Young enough to bear a child at the time of her marriage to the elderly merchant, Susan Roberts remained ensconced in the family mansion on Fifth Avenue following her husband’s death in 1880. See New York Times, 15 December 1874; Town Topics, 16 January 1886, 2; National Cyclopedia of American Biography, 62 vols. (New York: James T. White, 1893–1984), 3:350; and Shinn, Art Treasures, 2:37–50. The New York women were Anna Aspinwall, Abigail Blodgett, Sarah Hitchcock, Susan Roberts, Marietta Stevens, Cornelia Stewart, and Catharine Wolfe. Only the identity of the eighth woman, Mrs. A. E. Kidd, is untraced in existing historical records. Shinn mentions just one painting in her collection, Cabanel’s Death of Francesca di Rimini, 3:123. James Jackson Jarves, cited in Russell Lynes, More Than Meets the Eye: The History and Collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1981), 38. Sadakichi Hartmann claims that “wealthy New Yorkers were really forced to have a gallery”; see H. Wayne Morgan, New Muses: Art in American Culture 1865–1920 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1978), 10. See Lucy Kavaler, The Astors: A Family Chronicle of Pomp and Power (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1966), 95, and Louis Auchincloss, The Vanderbilt Era: Profiles of a Gilded Age (New York: Scribner, 1989), 32. On Caroline Belmont, see Kathleen McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 20 and 88. On Frances Morgan, see Katherine S. Howe et al., Herter Brothers: Furniture and Interiors for a Gilded Age (New York: Abrams, 1994), 86. Harriet Beecher Stowe, We and Our Neighbors (New York: J. B. Ford, 1875), 152. See also Grier, Culture and Comfort, 5–7. Rebecca Rabinow, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe: The First Woman Benefactor of the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” Apollo, 433 (March 1998), fig. 7. Shinn, Art Treasures, 1:119–34; Walter Rowlands, “The Miss Wolfe Collection,” Art Journal, 44 (January 1889), 12. See also Saul Zalesch, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe,” American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/wolfe, and Rabinow, “Catharine Lorillard Wolfe,” 48–55. Kristin Hoganson, “Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream, 1865– 1920,” American Historical Review, 107:1 (February 2002), 55–83. “Women Art Students’ Clubs,” Scribner’s Magazine, 22 (July 1897), 127–29; William Rhinelander Stewart, Grace Church and Old New York (New York: Dutton, 1924), 428–37; and Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, http://www.clwac.org/. McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 117–18. On Astor, see McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 45, and on Coles, see The Collector, 3 (15 February 1892), 102–103. New York Times, 5 April 1887, and Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 3:641. Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:120. Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 80 and 124; Newman, Subjects on Display, 7–10. On the gaze, see also Griselda Pollock, “Modernity and the Spaces of Femininity,” in her Vision and Diªerence (London: Routledge, 1988), 50–90, and Phelan, Unmarked, 17.

NOTES

•

245

84.

Wolfe included The Shulamite in her bequest to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which deaccessioned it through the Plaza Galleries on 7 June 1956; copy of letter to H. Barbara Weinberg from curator Katharine Baetjer, 19 April 1985, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe file, Metropolitan Museum of Art Archives. Its current location is unknown. I am grateful to my former student Rose Candelaria for providing me with this information. 85. Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 170. 86. Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:116; see obituary for Sarah Hitchcock, The Collector, 15 November 1891, 2. 87. See M. H. Dunlop, Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the-Century New York (New York: William Morrow, 2000), 66. The reticent collector was Louisine Elder Havemeyer, who will be discussed in the following chapter. For her remark, see Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector (New York: Ursus, 1961), 196. 88. Anne Higonnet, Berthe Morisot’s Images of Women (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 174. 89. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 75–76. 90. Wheaton A. Holden, “The Peabody Touch: Peabody and Stearns of Boston, 1870–1917,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, 32:2 (May 1973), 121–22. 91. On the American Aesthetic movement as an empowering “women’s movement,” see Stein, “Artifact as Ideology,” 24, and Mary Blanchard, Oscar Wilde’s America: Counterculture in the Gilded Age (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), xv. On the British appropriation of women’s culture, see Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, 289. 92. Mariana van Rensselaer, “The Development of American Homes,” in Household Art, ed. Candace Wheeler (New York: Harper, 1893), 46. On Wheeler, see Wilson Faude, “Associated Artists and the American Renaissance in the Decorative Arts,” Winterthur Portfolio, 10 (1975), 101–30. 93. Margaretta Frederick, “Walter Crane,” in Stephen Wildman, Waking Dreams: The Art of the Pre-Raphaelites from the Delaware Art Museum (Alexandria, VA: Art Services International, 2004), 136. On Morris and Norse literature, see Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Rochester, NY: D. S. Brewer, 2000). On Vinland, see Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Scrapbook, Preservation Society of Newport County, RI; New York Evening Post, 15 September 1883; Philadelphia Ledger and Transcript, 26 September 1883; New York Tribune, 5 April 1887; and Arnold Lewis, American Country Houses of the Gilded Age (New York: Dover, 1982), 100. Vinland is now the property of Salve Regina College. 94. Unsigned letter to Wolfe from St. Petersburg, Russia, 4 September 1884, Preservation Society of Newport County. Wolfe was aided by the decorator Richard Codman, Ogden Codman’s uncle, who was probably recommended by Peabody and Stearns, with whom he frequently worked. See Ogden Codman and the Decoration of Houses, ed. Pauline Metcalf (Boston: Boston Athenaeum, 1988), 6–7. 95. A. Charles Sewter, The Stained Glass of William Morris and his Circle: A Catalogue (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1975), 111.

246

•

NOTES

96. 97.

98.

99.

100. 101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106.

107.

108. 109.

110.

William Reed Huntington, The Religious Use of Wealth: A Sermon Commemorative of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe (New York: Dutton, 1887), 427. “Making the Home Beautiful,” undated clipping, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Scrapbook, Preservation Society of Newport County. Jackson Lears, The Culture of Consumption: Critical Essays in American History, 1880–1980 (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 3. Henry James, The Spoils of Poynton, A London Life, The Chaperon (New York: Scribner’s, 1908), 22 and 69. See also Bruce Wilshire, William James and Phenomenology (New York: AMS Press, 1979). Edith Wharton, Age of Innocence (1920; repr., New York: Bantam, 1996), chap. 31, 274. Wharton, “The Fullness of Life,” cited in R.W.B. Lewis, Edith Wharton: A Biography (New York: Fromm International, 1985), 66. Lewis, Edith Wharton, 413. Csikszentmihalyi and Rochberg-Halton, Meaning of Things (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 186. See Mary Louise Roberts, “Gender, Consumption, and Commodity Culture,” American Historical Review, 103:3 (June 1998), 817–44; Andrea Friedman, “The Politics of Consumption: Women and Consumer Culture,” Journal of Women’s History, 13:2 (2001), 159–68; and Erika Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000). Thorstein Veblen, The Theory of the Leisure Class (1899; repr., New York: Modern Library, 1934), 60. Lewis, Edith Wharton, 45, and Shari Benstock, No Gifts from Chance: A Biography of Edith Wharton (New York: Scribner’s, 1994), 46. Ellin Mackay Berlin, Silver Platter (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 227. Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:49. “Obituary,” New York Times, 4 April 1895. Walsingham, “Our Worldlings,” undated clipping with handwritten annotations, in scrapbook labeled “To the memory of Marietta (Mrs. Paran) Stevens who had genius for Society and inspiration for her friends these pages are inscribed,” New York Public Library. Benstock, No Gifts from Chance, 358. Lewis claims that Stevens was the source for Mrs. Mingott in Edith Wharton, 431. Benstock (ibid.) also claims that Stevens was the model for a second character in The Age of Innocence, the “nouveau-riche blowsy Mrs. Lemuel Struthers, the widow of a shoe polish magnate who had once used her image in his advertising.” The Collector, 3 (1 March 1892), 139. Maureen Montgomery, “Gilded Prostitution”: Status, Money, and Transatlantic Marriages, 1870–1914 (London: Routledge, 1989). On the Stevens family, see 8–9 and 22–23. According to Montgomery, Minnie Stevens Paget seems to have inherited her mother’s matchmaking skills: like Jacky March in Wharton’s The Buccaneers, she is alleged to have introduced American heiresses to titled noblemen in exchange for money and gifts (23). Wolfe to Mrs. Lorillard Spencer, 21 July 1885, Wolfe Papers, Preservation Society of Newport County. Wolfe also invited Stevens to her housewarming party for Vinland in 1883.

NOTES

•

247

111.

112. 113.

114.

115.

116.

1 17. 118.

119. 120. 121. 122.

Duncan S. Somerville, The Aspinwall Empire (Mystic, CT: Mystic Seaport Museum, 1983), 67. See also “William Henry Aspinwall,” in Dictionary of American Biography, CD-ROM (New York: Scribner’s, 1998); “William Henry Aspinwall,” in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes, 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 2:691–92; Harper’s Weekly, 26 February 1859; J. A. Scoville, Old Merchants of New York City (New York: Carleton, 1862), 306–14; Martha J. Lamb, The Homes of America (New York: Appleton, 1879), 163–65; and New York Public Library, Catalogue of the Pictures in the Gallery of William H. Aspinwall, No. 99 Tenth Street (New York: Ortgies Galleries, 1886). Jessica Benjamin, The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 126. I have presented this research on two occasions: in a keynote address, “Matronage and Matriarchy: The Lingua Materna of Art Collecting,” which I was invited to deliver at the annual meeting of the Victorians Institute, Chapel Hill, NC, October 2001; and in a paper, “Traversing the Domestic Frontier: Art Collecting and the Gendering of Culture,” which was the focus of a seminar at the annual meeting of the North American Society of Victorian Studies in Toronto, October 2004. Jacob von Falke, Art in the House (Boston: L. Prang, 1879), 315–16. William Walters was influenced by the Wallace Collection in London; see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 73, and Shinn, Art Treasures, 1:81–94. See Joyce Henri Robinson, “‘Hi Honey, I’m Home’: Weary (Neurasthenic) Businessmen and the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic,” in Not at Home, ed. Reed, 98–112, and Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 164, and Pyne, “Portrait of a Collector as an Agnostic: Charles Lang Freer and Connoisseurship,” Art Bulletin, 78 (March 1996), 80. See also Thomas Lawton and Linda Merrill, Freer: A Legacy of Art (Washington, DC: Freer Gallery of Art, 1993). Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 158. For an analysis of the motivations of the British businessman-collector, see Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class. On the predatory aspect of American captains of industry, see Lewis Mumford, The Golden Day: A Study of American Experience and Culture (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1926), 200–203. Lears, “Beyond Veblen,” 76. Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:123, and Félix Beé, “Le Fondateur du Musée de New-York,” L’Art, 4 (1876), 81. Suzaan Boettger, “Eastman Johnson’s Blodgett Family and Domestic Values during the Civil War Era,” American Art, 6 (Fall 1992), 60, and Holden, “Peabody Touch,”129. New York Times, 9 July 1904. Bibliomaniacs, according to The Collector, were usually men; yet this journal remarked on the passion of one New York woman, who traveled

248

•

NOTES

123. 124.

125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130.

131. 132. 133.

134. 135. 136.

137.

to Boston in 1892 to bid on a first edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s collected writings. Could this have been Abigail Blodgett? See Collector, 3:1 (June 1892), 231. Lynes, More than Meets the Eye, 33. See Basch, In the Eyes of the Law, 225–27, and Carole Shammas, Marylynn Salmon, and Michael Dahlin, Inheritance in America: From Colonial Times to the Present (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1987). Stephen Elias, Alexander T. Stewart: The Forgotten Merchant Prince (Westport, CT: Praeger, 1992), 194–200; Jay E. Cantor, “A Monument of Trade: A. T. Stewart and the Rise of the Millionaire’s Mansion in New York,” Winterthur Portfolio, 10 (1975), 195; Shinn, Art Treasures, 1:23–52 and 2:94; and John Oldcastle, “An American Millionaire’s Gallery,” Art Journal (May 1887), 153–56. Elias, Alexander T. Stewart, 220–22, and Towner, Elegant Auctioneers, 74 and 69. Elias, Alexander T. Stewart, 174–75 and 185; see also “Alexander Turney Stewart,” Dictionary of American Biography, 18:3–5. For Cornelia Stewart’s collection, see Elias, Alexander T. Stewart, 151. Shinn, Art Treasures, 1:23 and vi. Cornelia Stewart also commissioned a portrait of herself from Jeannette Loop and a posthumous portrait of her husband from Thomas Le Clear, in addition to bequeathing Rosa Bonheur’s The Horse Fair to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. See Lewis, Turner, and McQuillin, Opulent Interiors, 36. Cantor, “Monument of Trade,” 188, and Lewis, Turner, and McQuillin, Opulent Interiors, 35–39. Ryan, Women in Public, 76. William Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores,” Journal of American History, 71 (September 1984), 342. See also Leach, Land of Desire: Merchants, Power, and the Rise of a New American Culture (New York: Pantheon, 1993). Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:36. It is unlikely that she was married to the New York architect and critic of that name. E. Digby Baltzell, Philadelphia Gentlemen: The Making of a National Upper Class (Glencoe, IL: Free Press, 1958), 57. Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class, chap. 2. A decade earlier, writing about Philadelphia’s private collectors in Lippincott’s, Shinn struck a similarly democratic tone: “The luxurious position taken by Philadelphia as the chief manufacturer in a magnificent continent she expresses by her treasures of art. It is not in splendid private hotels, with façades covered with nymphs and garlands, that our regal capitalists satisfy their pride.” See Lippincott’s, 10 December 1872, 710. Shinn wrote a ten-part series on Philadelphia collections for Lippincott’s between April and December 1872. Elizabeth Duane Gillespie, A Book of Remembrances (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1910), 312, cited in Judith Paine, “The Women’s Pavilion of 1876,” The Feminist Art Journal, 4 (Winter 1975–76), 7. Gillespie was president of the Women’s Centennial Executive Committee. See also Jeanne M. Weimann, The Fair Women (Chicago: Academy, 1981), 1–6.

NOTES

•

249

138. 139.

140.

141.

142.

143.

144.

145.

146.

147. 148. 149.

Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Eighty Years and More (1898; repr., New York: Schocken Books, 1917), 316, cited in Paine, “Women’s Pavilion,” 11. See Eleanor Flexner and Ellen Fitzpatrick, Century of Struggle: The Woman’s Rights Movement in the United States, rev. ed. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 163–64. The Collector, 3 (15 March 1892), 159. On the Wilstach collection, see Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:30–34; Helen W. Henderson, The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and Other Collections of Philadelphia (Boston: Page, 1911), 29; and Aline Saarinen, The Proud Possessors (1958; repr., New York: Vintage, 1968), 97–98. See Weimann, Fair Women, 2–6. On Anna Wilstach’s will, see “Last Will and Testament of Anna H. Wilstach,” Wilstach Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania. Memorial Hall was transferred to the newly founded Philadelphia Museum of Art following the Centennial in 1876. Wilstach’s endowment permitted the later acquisition of such notable works as Whistler’s Yellow Buskin and paintings by John Constable and Thomas Gainsborough. See Richard Dorment, British Painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1986). Shinn, Art Treasures, 2:103–108; Frank Goodyear and Carolyn Diskant, Catalogue of the Joseph and Sarah Harrison Collection (Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 1974); and Joseph Harrison, Jr., The Iron Worker and King Solomon (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1868). Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:26; “Mr. J. Gillingham Fell’s Gallery,” Lippincott’s, 10 (August 1872), 226–30; “Last Will and Testament of Amanda R. Fell,” Fell Papers, Historical Society of Pennsylvania; and Colonial and Revolutionary Families of Pennsylvania, ed. Wilfred Jordan (New York: Lewis Historical Publishing, 1936), 502. [Earl Shinn], “Mr. A. E. Borie’s Gallery,” Lippincott’s, 10 (August 1872), 221–26, and Shinn, Art Treasures, 2:15–16. It is likely, however, that Elizabeth Borie was responsible for choosing Timoléon Lobrichon’s sentimentally anecdotal The Communists, which depicts a little girl feeding her doll while ignoring a begging dog. See also “Adolph Edward Borie,” Dictionary of American Biography, 2:464. Alice Hooper to Martin Brimmer, 24 July 1870, Objects File, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. See also Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:39. Hooper purchased the painting from the executors of Lord Taunton. Martin Butlin and Evelyn Joll, The Paintings of J.M.W. Turner, 2 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), 1:236, and Beaufort and Welcher, “Some Views of Art Buying in New York,” 51. Alice Hooper bequeathed the painting to her nephew, William Sturgis Hooper Lothrop, who sold it to the Museum of Fine Arts in 1899. See Andrew Walker, “From Private Sermon to Public Masterpiece: JMW Turner’s The Slave Ship in Boston, 1876–1899,” Journal of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 6 (1994), 4–13. Walker, “From Private Sermon to Public Masterpiece,” 7. Sarah Deutsch, Women and the City: Gender, Space, and Power in Boston, 1870–1940 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 15. On Peabody, see Sarah Allaback, “‘Our School of Design’: An Uncollected Letter by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody,” ANQ, 10 (Winter 1997), 12–19, and Bruce Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard Univer-

250

•

NOTES

150.

151.

152.

153.

154. 155. 156. 157. 158.

159. 160.

sity Press, 1999). For Henry and William James, see The Bostonians (1886; repr., London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 19. Women’s transition from abolitionists to suªragists is noted by several scholars, including Sara M. Evans, “Women’s History and Political Theory: Toward a Feminist Approach to Public Life,” in Visible Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 130. Madame Theresa Blanc [Theresa Bentzon], The Condition of Woman in the United States: A Traveller’s Notes, trans. Abby Langdon Alger (1895; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 101. On the works by Millet in the Shaw collection, see Susan Fleming, “The Boston Patrons of Millet,” in Alexandra R. Murphy, Jean-François Millet (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1984), x–xiii. “Pauline Agassiz Shaw,” in Notable American Women, 3:279; Fleming, “Boston Patrons of Millet,” xii; Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:85–87; Museum of Fine Arts, Quincy Adams Shaw Collection (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1918). Erica E. Hirshler, “Mrs. Gardner’s Rival: Susan Cornelia Warren and Her Art Collection,” Fenway Court (1988), 45–55. See especially the photograph of Warren’s integrated display of French paintings and Japanese blue and white porcelain reproduced on p. 49. On Gardner, see Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: Peter Weed, 1965); Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Art of Scandal: The Life and Times of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: HarperCollins, 1997); Anne Higonnet, “Private Museums, Public Leadership: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Art of Cultural Authority,” Fenway Court (1997), 79–92; Higonnet, “Museum Sight,” in Art and Its Publics, ed. Andrew McClellan (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), 133–47; Saarinen, Proud Possessors, 25–55; Erica Hirshler, “The Great Collectors: Isabella Stewart Gardner and Her Sisters,” in Pilgrims and Pioneers: New England Women in the Arts, ed. Alicia Faxon and Sylvia Moore (New York: Midmarch Arts, 1987), 24–31; and Anne Hawley, “Isabella Stewart Gardner: An Eye for Collecting,” in Before Peggy Guggenheim: American Women Art Collectors, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorai (Venice: Marsilio, 2001), 59–64. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13. Bill Brown, “Thing Theory,” in Things, ed. Bill Brown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 5. Rollin van Hadley, The Letters of Bernard Berenson and Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887–1924 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 66. See William L. Vance, “Berenson and Mrs. Gardner: A Rivalry of Aspirations,” New England Quarterly, 61 (December 1988), 575–95. Vance, “Berenson and Mrs. Gardner,” 13. On Gardner’s décor, see Adolph Cavallo, “An Introduction to the Textile Collection at Fenway Court,” Fenway Court (1981), 10, fig. 4. Brown, A Sense of Things, 11. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1908), chap. 19, 287. On the fabric, see Cavallo, “Introduction to the Textile Collection,” 8, and Hilliard Goldfarb, The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995),

NOTES

•

251

161.

162. 163. 164.

119–20. The terms of Gardner’s will are described in Anne Higonnet, “Where There’s a Will . . . ,” Art in America, May 1989, 65–75. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1978), 67. I prefer Paul Holdengräber’s translation of besitz as “possession” rather than “ownership,” as in Harry Zohn’s translation, which as Holdengräber argues conveys only half of its meaning. See Holdengräber, “Between the Profane and the Redemptive: The Collector as Possessor in Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk,” History and Memory, 4:2 (1992), 96. Isabella Stewart Gardner to Edmund C. Hill, 21 June 1917, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum Archive. Harriet Spoªord, Art Decoration Applied to Furniture (New York: Harper, 1877), 232. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 176.

CHAPTER 3: ART AND ACTIVISM

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

Susan B. Anthony to Jane Stanford, 1896, cited in Gunther W. Nagel, Iron Will: The Life and Letters of Jane Stanford (Stanford, CA: Stanford Alumni Association, 1985), 8–9. Phoebe Hearst to Mrs. Stearns, 2 January 1913, reproduced in “Mrs. Hearst Is for Suªrage,” unidentified clipping, Phoebe Apperson Hearst Papers, Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley (hereafter PAH Papers). See also Judith Robinson, The Hearsts: An American Dynasty (New York: Avon, 1991), 372. See Nancy F. Cott, “What’s in a Name? The Limits of ‘Social Feminism’; or Expanding the Vocabulary of Women’s History,” The Journal of American History, 76 (December 1989), 829. See Inez Haynes Irwin, The Story of Alice Paul and the National Woman’s Party (Fairfax, VA: Delinger’s, 1964), 160. Hearst is only known to have marched in public on one occasion, in the Preparedness Day Parade in San Francisco on 22 July 1916 in support of the war eªort; she did so at the behest of both the suªragists and the Pioneer Women of California. See Robinson, Hearsts, 361–62. Anna Pratt Simpson, Problems Women Solved: Being the Story of the Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition: What Vision, Enthusiasm, Work and Cooperation Accomplished (San Francisco: Woman’s Board, 1915), 148–51. The sculpture is now located in Golden Gate Park. Gertrude Atherton, My San Francisco: A Wayward Biography (New York: Bobbs-Merrill, 1946), 187. Robert Griswold, “Anglo Women and Domestic Ideology in the American West in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” in Western Women: Their Land, Their Lives, ed. Lillian Schlissel, Vicki Ruiz, and Janice Monk (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1988), 22. Mary P. Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 164, and Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000).

252

•

NOTES

9. Phoebe Apperson Hearst, “California as a Field for Women’s Activities,” California’s Magazine, 1 (July 1915), 371–73. 10. See Shirley Ardener, Women and Space: Ground Rules and Social Maps (New York: St. Martin’s, 1981); Daphne Spain, Gendered Spaces (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); and Gillian Rose, Feminism and Geography: The Limits of Geographical Knowledge (Cambridge: Polity, 1993). 1 1. Laura Mulvey, “Pandora: Topographies of the Mask and Curiosity,” in Sexuality and Space, ed. Beatriz Colomina (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), 53–71. 12. Earl Shinn, Art Treasures of America, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Gebbie and Barrie, 1879–82), 3:41–50. The women collectors were Mary Ann Deming Crocker, Ellen White Colton, Isabella Richardson Dennison, Catherine Birdsell Johnson, Louise Hungerford Mackay, and Phoebe Apperson Hearst. 13. Tremenheere L. Johns, “Art in California,” California Art Gallery, January 1873, cited in Birgitta Hjalmarson, Artful Players: Artistic Life in Early San Francisco (Los Angeles: Balcony Press, 1999), 33. Julie Roy Jeªrey notes that culture and morality were female concerns; see her Frontier Women: “Civilizing” the West? 1840–1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1998), 5. See also Susan Armitage, “Women and Men in Western History: A Stereoptical Vision,” Western Historical Quarterly, 16 (October 1985), 381–95, and Julie Roy Jeªrey’s original edition of Frontier Women: The Trans-Mississippi West, 1840–1880 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1979). 14. See Anthony W. Lee, Picturing Chinatown: Art and Orientalism in San Francisco (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 71–78, and Doris Muscatine, Old San Francisco: The Biography of a City from Early Days to the Earthquake (New York: Putnam, 1975), 385–91. 15. On Mary Ann Crocker, see Julia Altrocchi, The Spectacular San Franciscans (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1949), 168, 215, 254, and 306, and David Warren Ryder, “Great Citizen”: A Biography of William H. Crocker (San Francisco: Historical Publications, 1962), 36ª. The interior of the Crocker mansion is described in California Spirit, 25 October 1879, 41–44. 16. Diana Strazdes, “The Millionaire’s Palace: Leland Stanford’s Commission for Pottier and Stymus in San Francisco,” Winterthur Portfolio, 36 (Winter 2001), 213–43, and Oscar Lewis, The Big Four: The Story of Huntington, Stanford, Hopkins, and Crocker and the Building of the Central Pacific (New York: Knopf, 1938), 169. The Stanfords’ collection is discussed in Shinn, Art Treasures, 3:47. 17. Amelia Ransome Neville, The Fantastic City: Memoirs of the Social and Romantic Life of Old San Francisco (Boston: Houghton, Mi›in, 1932), 182. 18. See Bertha Berner, Mrs. Leland Stanford: An Intimate Account (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1935), 19, and Carol Osborne, Museum Builders in the West: The Stanfords as Collectors and Patrons of Art 1870–1906 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Art Museum, 1986). 19. On California women’s property rights, see Donna C. Schuele, “‘None Could Deny the Eloquence of This Lady’: Women, Law, and Government in California, 1850–1890,” in Taming the Elephant: Politics, Government, and Law in Pioneer California, ed. John F. Burns and Richard Orsi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 169–98. 20. Wanda M. Corn, “Art Matronage in Post-Victorian America,” in “Cultural Leadership in

NOTES

•

253

21.

22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

America: Art Matronage and Patronage,” special issue, Fenway Court (1997), 14. See also The Collector, 4:9 (1 March 1893), 144. Gertrude Atherton, “Woman in Her Variety,” San Francisco Examiner, 6 August 1891. The San Francisco Morning Call also described Hopkins as “a cold woman”; see “Palatial Houses,” San Francisco Morning Call, 5 October 1891. For Hopkins’s biography, see Sister Martina Flinton, The Searles Saga (Great Barrington, MA: privately printed, 1976). Phoebe Hearst to “Alice,” 1 June 1906, PAH Papers. Nancy A. Hewitt, “Taking the True Woman Hostage,” Journal of Women’s History, 14 (Spring 2002), 158. See also Mary Louise Roberts, “True Womanhood Revisited,” Journal of Women’s History, 14 (Spring 2002), 151. On Arabella Huntington, see Cerinda W. Evans, Arabella Duval Huntington 1851–1924 (Richmond, VA: Whittet and Shepperson, 1959); Robert R. Wark, “Arabella Huntington and the Beginnings of the Art Collection,” The Huntington Library Quarterly, 32 (August 1969), 309–31; Robert R. Wark, French Decorative Art in the Huntington Collection (Pasadena, CA: Castle Press, 1978); James T. Maher, The Twilight of Splendor: Chronicles of the Age of American Palaces (Boston: Little Brown, 1975), 240–306; S. N. Berman, Duveen (New York: Vintage, 1951); and Edward Fowles, Memories of Duveen Brothers (London: Times Books, 1976). Ben Procter, William Randolph Hearst: The Early Years, 1863–1910 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 17. Created in 1866 by a hotelkeeper, Woodward’s Gardens featured curiosities, ethnographic displays, and California paintings, in addition to copies of European works of art. See C. H. Webb, “A California Caravansary,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, April 1867, 606; John P. Young, San Francisco: A History of the Pacific Coast Metropolis, 2 vols. (San Francisco: S. J. Clarke, 1912), 1:465; and Neville, Fantastic City, 176–77. On Phoebe Hearst, see Winifred Black Bonfils, The Life and Personality of Phoebe Apperson Hearst (San Francisco: printed for William Randolph Hearst by John Henry Nash, 1928); Robinson, Hearsts; and Alexandra Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst: The Most Powerful Woman in California” (PhD diss., University of California, Davis, 1994). Procter, William Randolph Hearst, 21–22, and John Tebbel, The Life and Good Times of William Randolph Hearst (New York: Dutton, 1952), 52–55. Shinn attributes the Mackays’ collection to Louise’s husband, John, in his text, but lists “Mrs. J. W. Mackay” as its owner in his index. See Art Treasures of America, 3:49. On Clarence Mackay’s collection, see his granddaughter’s account in Mary Ellin Barrett, Irving Berlin: A Daughter’s Memoir (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 163. Advised by Bernard Berenson and Sir Joseph Duveen, he specialized in Renaissance painting. He sold his collection to Samuel Kress and the Metropolitan Museum of Art after the 1929 stock market crash. See Oscar Lewis, Silver Kings: The Lives and Times of Mackay, Fair, Flood, and O’Brien, Lords of the Nevada Comstock Lode (New York: Knopf, 1947). When George Hearst heard about the silver discovery in Virginia City, he bought a one-sixth interest in the Ophir mine for $7,000 in 1859. In 1872 he sold his stock in Ophir, and he and his partners bought the Ontario mine of Utah, which produced prodigious amounts of silver. In 1877 he bought the Homestake mine in Lead, South Dakota, which yielded $715 million in

254

•

NOTES

29.

30.

31.

32. 33.

34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40.

gold from 1878 to 1962. In 1880–81 he became a full partner in the Anaconda mine at Butte, Montana, one of the greatest copper finds in the United States. See Procter, William Randolph Hearst, 6 and 15. The building in Mackay’s name is at the University of Nevada, Reno, and Hearst’s is at the University of California, Berkeley. For the relationship between the Hearsts and the Mackays, see Andria Daley Taylor, “Girls of the Golden West,” in Comstock Women: The Making of a Mining Community, ed. Ronald M. James and C. Elizabeth Raymond (Reno: University of Nevada Press, 1998), 271. Louise Mackay and Marietta Stevens originally met in San Francisco in 1869 or 1870; see Ellin Mackay Berlin, Silver Platter (New York: Doubleday, 1957), 226–35, and Neville, Fantastic City, 168–70. Berlin refers here to Katherine Deane de Young, wife of Charles de Young, publisher of the San Francisco Chronicle, a rival to the Hearsts’ San Francisco Examiner. Louise Mackay was godmother to Katherine de Young’s daughter Kathleen. See Helen de Young Cameron, Nineteen Nineteen: The Story of the de Young House at 1919 California Street (San Francisco: privately printed, 1967), 27. Berlin, Silver Platter, 368. Ellin Berlin broke with the family’s upwardly mobile social trajectory when she married songwriter Irving Berlin. See Gunda Barth-Scalmani and Margret Friedrich, “Frauen auf der Wiener Weltausstellung von 1873,” in Bürgerliche Frauenkultur im 19 Jarhrhundert, ed. Brigitte MazohlWallnig (Vienna: Böhlan Verlag, 1995), 175–232, and Mary Pepchinski, “The Woman’s Building and the World Exhibitions: Exhibition Architecture and Conflicting Feminine Ideals at European and American World Exhibitions, 1873–1915,” http://www.theo.tucottbus.de/wolke/eng/Subjects/001/Pepchinski, accessed 6 June 2003. On Hearst’s visit to Vienna, see Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 82. See Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America’s Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988), 25. 15 February 1867, Diary of Sidney George Fisher 1834–71, ed. Nicholas B. Wainwright (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Historical Society, 1967), 523. Walter Smith, The Masterpieces of the Centennial Illustrated, 3 vols. (Philadelphia: Gebbie and Barrie, 1876–78), 2:96. Ibid., 2:278. See Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 103 and 124–25; Karen Wolk Finkelstein, “Kindergartens, Feminism and the Professionalization of Motherhood,” International Journal of Women’s Studies, 3 (January–February 1980), 31–32; Patricia L. De Cos, History and Development of Kindergarten in California (Sacramento: California Research Bureau, 2001); and Atherton, My San Francisco, 180–81. Karen Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 2. Cheryl Robertson, “From Cult to Profession: Domestic Women in Search of Equality,” in The Material Culture of Gender / The Gender of Material Culture, ed. Katharine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), 104. For the spatiality of voluntary organizations, see Sara M. Evans, “Women’s History and Political Theory: Toward a Feminist Approach to Public Life,” in Visible

NOTES

•

255

41.

42.

43.

44. 45.

46. 47.

48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Women: New Essays on American Activism, ed. Nancy Hewitt and Suzanne Lebsock (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993), 119–39. Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 130–34 and 114–15, and Mary Jean Houde, Reaching Out: A Story of the General Federation of Women’s Clubs (Chicago: Mobium Press, 1989). The Hearsts had bought a house on Chestnut Street in San Francisco in 1863 but had given it up and rented space from friends on Nob Hill in 1877. Phoebe Hearst notes the success of one of her husband’s mines and discusses the move to California Street in a letter to Eliza Pike, 5 January 1877, PAH Papers. See also Fremont Older, George Hearst: California Pioneer (Los Angeles: Westernlore, 1966), 129; Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 55, 58, and 126; and Neville, Fantastic City, 186. William Seale, The Tasteful Interlude: American Interiors through the Camera’s Eye, 1860–1917 (Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press, 1995), 167–68. Hearst referred to the “pretty things” she was buying in Europe in a letter to Eliza Pike written in Munich, 26 September 1873, PAH Papers. On Johnston, see P. Daniel and R. Smock, A Talent for Detail: The Photographs of Miss Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1889–1910 (New York: Harmony Books, 1974). The Collector, 3 (1 March 1892), 140. On the tapestries in Hearst’s Washington house, see Maurice Hudkins, “Portraits, Photographs, Sculptures and Possessions of Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” typescript, 1982, PAH Papers. Hudkins also discusses Hearst’s purchase of the Ffoulke tapestries, which she later sold to John R. McLean and which are now in the collection of the Philadelphia Museum of Art. Charles Ffoulke and Sarah Cushing also sold part of their collection to Isabella Stewart Gardner and Elizabeth Coles; see Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: Peter Weed, 1965), 269–71. “Slipped on Sawyer’s Rugs,” Chicago Herald, 15 December 1890, cited in Robinson, Hearsts, 225. For George Hearst’s response to the house, see p. 224. On Hearst’s visit to Paris, see Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 110 and 150. The Collector reported that Hearst bought “a number of rare hangings and valuable old prayer rugs and tapestries for her beautiful new house in Washington” on this trip; The Collector, 1 March 1892, 140. Deborah Silverman, Art Nouveau in Fin-de-Siècle France: Politics, Psychology and Style (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 193. Bertha Palmer, cited in David F. Burg, Chicago’s White City of 1893 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1976), 104. See Amanda Peck and Carol Irish, Candace Wheeler: The Art and Enterprise of American Design 1875–1900 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2001), 230. See ibid., 64 and 180–82. Candace Wheeler, “The New Woman and Her Home Needs,” The Christian Union, 43 (25 June 1891), 3. Candace Wheeler, “Art Education for Women,” The Outlook, 2 January 1897, 81. Candace Wheeler, “A Dream City,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 86 (May 1893), 836 and 838. Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 65, and Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 154.

256

•

NOTES

56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

61. 62.

63.

64.

65.

66.

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73. 74.

On Cooper’s lectures, see Jeanne Madeline Weimann, The Fair Women: The Story of the Woman’s Building, World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago, 1893 (Chicago: Academy Chicago, 1981), 335–36. Palmer, cited in Ishbel Ross, Silhouette in Diamonds: The Life of Mrs. Potter Palmer (New York: Arno, 1975), 85. Palmer, cited in Weimann, Fair Women, 233. Weimann, Fair Women, 28 ª, and Judy Sund, “Columbus and Columbia in Chicago, 1893: Man of Genius Meets Generic Woman,” Art Bulletin, September 1993, 443–55. Palmer, cited in Burg, Chicago’s White City, 239. See Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women’s Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1984). Kristin Hoganson, “Cosmopolitan Domesticity: Importing the American Dream, 1865– 1920,” American Historical Review, 107:1 (February 2002), 79. Richard Guy Wilson, “Expressions of Identity,” in The American Renaissance 1876–1917 (New York: Brooklyn Museum, 1979), 12. See also Dianne Pilgrim, “Decorative Art: The Domestic Environment,” in ibid., 111–51, and Robert A. M. Stern et al., New York 1880: Architecture and Urbanism in the Gilded Age (New York: Monacelli Press, 1999). Meryle Secrest, Duveen: A Life in Art (New York: Knopf, 2004), 93. On the influence of the Wallace Collection, see Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 73 and 75. Gabriel Weisberg, “From Paris to Pittsburgh: Visual Culture and American Taste, 1880–1910,” in Gabriel P. Weisberg, DeCourcy E. McIntosh, and Alison McQueen, Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 179. Ross, Silhouette in Diamonds, 206. On Palmer’s collection, see Bertha Palmer Papers, Chicago Historical Society, and Palmer Gifts and Loans, files 9–15–18, Art Institute of Chicago Collection Records. Arnold Lewis, James Turner, and Steven McQuillin, The Opulent Interiors of the Gilded Age: All 203 Photographs from “Artistic Houses” (New York: Dover, 1987), 11. On Frick, see Samuel Schreiner, Henry Clay Frick (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), and Weisberg, McIntosh, and McQueen, Collecting in the Gilded Age. Helen L. Horowitz, “Varieties of Cultural Experience in Jane Addams’ Chicago,” History of Education Quarterly, 14:1 (Spring 1974), 70. Ida Honoré Grant, cited in Ross, Silhouette in Diamonds, 122–23. Donald L. Miller, City of the Century: The Epic of Chicago and the Making of America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 46, and Weimann, Fair Women, 19. Hearst, “California as a Field for Women’s Activities,” 371–73. Phoebe Hearst to Clara Anthony, 1 April 1896, PAH Papers. Bonfils, Life and Personality of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, 14. On the Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, see Procter, William Randolph Hearst, 70; Robinson, Hearsts, 252–58; and Bonfils, Life and Personality of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, 114–17. Ellen Dissanayake, interview with Caleb Crain, “The Artistic Animal,” Lingua Franca, October 2001, 32.

NOTES

•

257

75. Club Life, November 1902, 9. 76. The best description of the interior of the hacienda is Porter Garnett’s “Stately Homes of California, V: Hacienda del Pozo de Verona,” Sunset, 32:2 (April 1914); reprinted in Porter Garnett, Stately Homes of California (Boston: Little Brown, 1915), 843–46. 77. Brenda Danet and Tamar Katriel, “No Two Alike: Play and Aesthetics in Collecting,” Play and Culture, 2 (1989), 265. 78. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in his Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1978), 60. I have substituted Paul Holdengräber’s translation of besitz as “possession” rather than “ownership.” See his “Between the Profane and the Redemptive: The Collector as Possessor in Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk,” History and Memory, 4:2 (1992), 96. 79. Garnett, Stately Homes, 846, and Bonfils, Life and Personality of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, 116. William Randolph Hearst commissioned A. C. Schweinfurth to design the hacienda, which was unfinished at the time of the architect’s death in 1900. On Julia Morgan’s addition to the house, see Sarah Holmes Boutelle, Julia Morgan, Architect (New York: Abbeville, 1995), 171–73. 80. William Randoph Hearst to Phoebe Hearst, January 1889, cited in Robinson, Hearsts, 221–22. 81. David Pugh, Sons of Liberty: The Masculine Mind in Nineteenth-Century America (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1983), 83. 82. On the complexities of the relationship between Phoebe Hearst and her son, see “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” in Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 2:172, and Procter, William Randolph Hearst, 13. On the increased American interest in established masterpieces, see Flaminia Santori, The Melancholy of Masterpieces: Old Master Paintings in America (Milan: 5 Continents, 2003). 83. Garnett, Stately Homes, 846. 84. Luther Burbank to Phoebe Hearst, 5 October 1912, PAH Papers. 85. See Olivia Sage, “Opportunities and Responsibilities of Leisured Women,” North American Review, 181 (November 1905), 712–21; Ruth Crocker, “From Widow’s Mite to Widow’s Might: The Philanthropy of Margaret Olivia Sage,” American Presbyterians, 74 (Winter 1996), 253–64; and Ruth Crocker, Mrs. Russell Sage: Women’s Activism and Philanthropy in Gilded Age and Progressive Era America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006). See also Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 4 (December 1909), 219–20; 5 (January 1910), 14–16; 6 (March 1911), 68 and 95–96; 9 (January 1914), 25; and 11 (June 1916), 134. 86. Alexandra Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s ‘Gospel of Wealth,’ 1883–1901,” Pacific Historical Review, 71:4 (2002), 575–605. 87. Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 185, 198–230, and Timothy Thoresen, “Paying the Piper and Calling the Tune: The Beginnings of Academic Anthropology in California,” Journal of the History of the Behavioral Sciences, 11 (1975), 257–75. 88. Donna Haraway, “Teddy Bear Patriarchy: Taxidermy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 1908–1916,” Social Text, 11 (Winter 1984–85), 20–64. 89. Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s ‘Gospel of Wealth,’” 600. See also Robinson, Hearsts, 298.

258

•

NOTES

90.

91. 92.

93.

94.

95. 96.

97. 98. 99.

100.

Hearst purchased the tapestries from Sarah and Charles Ffoulke; see Charles Mather Ffoulke, Description of Artemisia Tapestries Belonging to Mrs. Hearst ([San Francisco], before 1913), and Osborne, Museum Builders in the West, 37–38. Hearst also lent the Coriolanus set of tapestries that the Empress Eugénie gave to the city of Lyon; see Description of Coriolanus Set of Tapestries Belonging to Mrs. Hearst, undated pamphlet, PAH Papers, and San Francisco Art Association, Catalogue, Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst Loan Collection, ed. J. Nilsen Laurvik (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1917), 53–60. The tapestries are now in the collection of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts. Bonfils, Life and Personality of Phoebe Apperson Hearst, 110. Helen M. Hanson to Phoebe Hearst, 28 June 1903, “Letters Written by Hearst Domestic Industries Students,” PAH Papers. See also Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst’s ‘Gospel of Wealth,’” 597–600. Surveyors of Persian Art: Documentary Biography of Arthur Upham Pope and Phyllis Ackerman, ed. Jay Gluck and Noel Siver (Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 1996). Pope and Ackerman also decorated the Ahwanee Hotel in Yosemite in 1927; see George W. O’Bannon, “The Grand Gesture: The Ahwanee Hotel, Phyllis Ackerman and Arthur Upham Pope,” Oriental Rug Review, 8:3 (1988), http://www.rugreview.com/83ahwa.htm, accessed 7 June 2006. The San Francisco Art Association was founded in 1871. In 1893 Edward Searles, husband of the late Mary Frances Hopkins, deeded the Mark Hopkins Institute of Art to the University of California as trustee of the Art Association. After the earthquake it was rebuilt and renamed the San Francisco Institute of Art. In 1916 the Art Association assumed the directorship of the Museum of Modern Art, located in the Palace of Fine Arts. See San Francisco Art Association, Illustrated Catalogue of the Post-Exposition Exhibition in the Department of Fine Arts, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, January 1– May 1, 1916 (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1916). See also Betty Hoag McGlynn, “The San Francisco Art Association,” http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/2aa/2aa651 .htm, accessed 27 November 2007; reprinted in Plein Air Painters of California, the North, ed. Ruth Westphal (Irvine, CA: Westphal Publishing, 1986). Phyllis Ackerman, “Introduction: Tapestries,” in Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst Loan Collection, ed. J. Nilsen Laurvik (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1917), 39. Michel Foucault, “Of Other Spaces,” Diacritics, 16 (Spring 1986), 24–27. See also Phillip Wegner, Imaginary Communities: Utopia, the Nation, and the Spatial Histories of Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002). Phoebe Hearst to Alice Booth MacDonald, 1 June 1906, PAH Papers. Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 3. Mrs. Frederick G. Sanborn, “Work and Purposes of the Women’s Board of the PanamaPacific International Exposition,” California’s Magazine, 1 (July 1915), 374. Susan Armitage contends that women in the American West were prone to letting men take over the organizations they had worked hard to establish; see her “Through Women’s Eyes: A New View of the West,” in The Women’s West, ed. Susan Armitage and Elizabeth Jameson (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987), 13. Gayle Gullett, Becoming Citizens: The Emergence and Development of the California Women’s Movement, 1880–1911 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 2.

NOTES

•

259

101.

102. 103. 104.

105.

106. 107.

108. 109. 110. 1 1 1. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117.

Dr. Frederick Skiª, cited in Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition: Being the O‹cial History of the International Celebration Held at San Francisco in 1915 to Commemorate the Discovery of the Pacific Ocean and the Construction of the Panama Canal, 5 vols. (New York: Putnam’s, 1921), 1:207. Among these sculptors were Sherry E. Fry, Edith Baretto Parsons, Anna Coleman Ladd, and Janet Scudder. See ibid., 1:217, 4:15, and 4:149–50. Frances A. Groª, “Lovely Woman at the Exposition,” Sunset, 34 (May 1915), 876 and 879. San Francisco Chronicle, 4 April 1915. The e‹gy was renamed “Little Eva” after the National Woman Suªrage Association’s protest. On the suªrage petition, see Todd, Story of the Exposition, 4:41–42. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Discourses of Sexuality and Subjectivity: The New Woman, 1870–1936,” in Hidden from History: Reclaiming the Gay and Lesbian Past, ed. Martin Duberman et al. (New York: New American Library, 1989), 267. For a similar viewpoint, see Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 28, and Roberts, “True Womanhood Revisited,” 150–56. Amelia G. Catlin to Phoebe Hearst, 25 August 1910, cited in Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 295. On the YWCA, see Nina Mjagkij and Margaret Spratt, Men and Women Adrift: The YMCA and the YWCA in the City (New York: New York University Press, 1997). On Hearst and the YWCA, see Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 292–344. Hearst’s relationship with Julia Morgan is detailed in Boutelle, Julia Morgan, Architect, 88–104. Groª, “Lovely Woman at the Exposition,” 880–81. Jane Addams was forced to cancel her speech because of illness; see Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 130. Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 62–80, and Erik Larson, The Devil in the White City: Murder, Magic, and Madness at the Fair That Changed America (New York: Crown, 2003). Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 175. Nickliss, “Phoebe Apperson Hearst,” 324–25. Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 85. Sigmund Freud, “The Relation of the Poet to Day-Dreaming” (1908), in Sigmund Freud: Collected Papers, ed. Anna Freud, 5 vols. (London: Hogarth Press, 1957), 4:176. Inez Haynes Gillmore, “The Californiacs,” Sunset, 36 (February 1916), 60. On the décor of the Women’s Board’s quarters, see Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 87–97. Hearst, “California as a Field for Women’s Activities,” 371–73. Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 41. Lundborg studied with muralist Arthur Mathews in San Francisco and James Abbott McNeill Whistler in Paris. She was awarded a bronze medal for her mural at the PPIE. See Edan Hughes, Artists in California 1786–1940 (San Francisco: Hughes Publishing, 1986), and Lawrence Dinnean, Les Jeunes: An Account of Some Fin-de-Siècle San Francisco Authors and Artists (Berkeley: Bancroft Library, 1980). The Women’s Board donated Lundborg’s mural to the University of California. It is currently stored in the basement of the San Francisco War Memorial and Performing Arts Center under the auspices of the San Francisco Arts Commission.

260

•

NOTES

118.

119.

120. 121. 122.

123.

124. 125. 126.

127.

128.

129.

130. 131. 132.

Sally Webster, Eve’s Daughter / Modern Woman: A Mural by Mary Cassatt (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2004), 74. See also Norma Broude, “Mary Cassatt: Modern Woman or the Cult of True Womanhood?,” Woman’s Art Journal, 21:2 (Fall 2000/ Winter 2001), 36–43. Mary Cassatt to Sara Hallowell, quoted in a letter from Hallowell to Bertha Palmer, 6 February [1894], in Cassatt and Her Circle: Selected Letters, ed. Nancy Mowll Mathews (New York: Abbeville, 1984), 254. Simpson, Problems Women Solved, 119. Ibid., 186–88. Pepchinski, “The Woman’s Building and the World Exhibitions.” Another useful internet source on women and the PPIE is Susan Wels, “Spheres of Influence: The Role of Women at the Chicago World’s Columbian Exposition of 1893 and the San Francisco Panama Pacific International Exposition of 1915,” http://userwww.sfsu.edu/~epf/1999/ wels.html. Louisine W. Havemeyer, “The Prison Special: Memories of a Militant,” Scribner’s Magazine, 71 (June 1922), 661–76. See also the entry on Havemeyer in Notable American Women, 2:156–58. Louisine W. Havemeyer, “The Suªrage Torch: Memories of a Militant,” Scribner’s Magazine, 71 (May 1922), 529. Louisine W. Havemeyer, Sixteen to Sixty: Memoirs of a Collector (1961), ed. Susan Alyson Stein (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), 30. Richard Collin, “Public Collections and Private Collectors,” American Quarterly, 46:3 (September 1994), 450, and Daniel Catlin, Good Work Well Done: The Sugar Business Career of Horace Havemeyer (New York: D. Catlin, 1988). Frances Weitzenhoªer, The Havemeyers: Impressionism Comes to America (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1986), 29, and Philippe de Montebello, Foreword, in Alice Cooney Frelinghuysen et al., Splendid Legacy: The Havemeyer Collection (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1993), ix. Havemeyer, “Suªrage Torch,” 529–30. See Margaret Finnegan, Selling Suªrage: Consumer Culture and Votes for Women (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), and William Leach, “Transformations in a Culture of Consumption: Women and Department Stores,” Journal of American History, 71 (September 1984), 337–39. Mary Cassatt, quoted by Havemeyer in her speech “The Waking Up of Women,” c. 1923–24; see Weitzenhoªer, Havemeyers, 220. See also Rebecca Rabinow, “The Suªrage Exhibition of 1915,” in Frelinghuysen et al., Splendid Legacy, 89–95, and Griselda Pollock, Diªerencing the Canon: Feminist Desire and the Writing of Art’s Histories (London: Routledge, 1999), 201–204. Havemeyer, “Suªrage Torch,” 539. Ibid., 535. Clarice Stasz, The Vanderbilt Women (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 235, and Amanda Mackenzie Stuart, Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt (New York: HarperCollins, 2005), 366. Vanderbilt’s niece Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney exhibited two of her sculptures on the grounds of the PPIE; see “National Campaign Begun for Suªrage,” San Francisco Chronicle, 15 September 1915.

NOTES

•

261

133.

134. 135.

136. 137.

138.

139.

Alva Smith Vanderbilt Belmont, “Autobiography (written by Sara Bard Field [Wood] as though in the words of Alva Belmont),” typescript manuscript, C.E.S. Wood Collection, Huntington Library, San Marino, CA, 2. The typescript is heavily annotated in Vanderbilt’s hand. Field was one of two women Vanderbilt hired to assist her in writing her autobiography. Her research notes and typed first draft are also in the Huntington Library. A later typescript prepared by Matilda Young is located in the William R. Perkins Library at Duke University. Stern et al., New York 1880, 592 and 596. Notable American Women, 1:127. Vanderbilt also attributed her conversion to activism to her great-grandmother, who provided her with a model for the “militant assertion of the individual’s right to personal liberty”; Vanderbilt, “Autobiography,” 1. Vanderbilt, “Autobiography,” 11. On Adelaide Johnson, see Notable American Women: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 380–81. The monument was installed in the rotunda for one day before being moved to the basement of the Capitol building, where it remained until 1997. The recent entry on Vanderbilt in American National Biography Online notes that she has been left out of most histories of the suªrage movement; see Katheryn P. Viens, “Alva Erskine Smith Vanderbilt Belmont,” http://www.anb.org/articles/belmont. Other sources about the connection between Marble House and the suªrage movement include Stasz, Vanderbilt Women, 223–24, and Stuart, Consuelo and Alva Vanderbilt, 364ª. Henry James, The Bostonians (1886; repr., London: Penguin Classics, 1986), 327. See Charles R. Anderson’s introduction to this edition of The Bostonians for an account of James’s sources (18–19).

CHAPTER 4: THE GENDERING OF THE MODERN MUSEUM

1.

2.

3.

Milton Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (Greenwich, CT: New York Graphics Society, 1963), 310–13, and Bennard B. Perlman, The Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1998), 216. Clara Davidge designed the installation of the Armory Show; see Christine Oaklander, “Clara Davidge’s Madison Art Gallery: Sowing the Seed for the Armory Show,” Archives of American Art Journal, 36 (1996), 20–37. With the exception of Peggy Guggenheim, whose activities fall beyond the time frame of this book, very little research has been done on women dealers of modern art. In addition to Davidge, these include Harriet Bryant, Rose Fried, and Marie Sterner, all of whom operated galleries in New York, and Katharine Kuh and Alice Roullier of Chicago. For the notion of sisterhood as a synecdoche, see Michael Cohen, Sisters: Relation and Rescue in Nineteenth-Century British Novels and Paintings (Madison, NJ: Farleigh Dickinson University Press, 1995), 9. George Santayana, “The Genteel Tradition of American Philosophy,” in his Winds of Doctrine (London: Dent, 1913), 186–215, cited in Christine Stansell, “Women Artists and the Problem of Metropolitan Culture: New York and Chicago, 1890–1910,” in “Cul-

262

•

NOTES

4.

5. 6.

7.

8.

9.

10.

11. 12.

tural Leadership in America: Art Matronage and Patronage,” special issue, Fenway Court, 27 (1997), 25. Earl Barnes, “The Feminizing of Culture,” Atlantic Monthly, 109 (June 1912), 772. On this topic, see Ann Douglas, The Feminization of American Culture (New York: Knopf, 1977); Ann Douglas, Terrible Honesty: Mongrel Manhattan in the 1920s (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995); and Kathleen McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 149–51. Ramsay Traquair, “Women and Civilization,” Atlantic Monthly, 132 (September 1923), 296. Ralph P. Locke, “Reflections on Art and Music in America, on Stereotypes of the Woman Patron, and on Cha(lle)nges in the Present and Future,” in Cultivating Music in America: Women Patrons and Activists since 1860, ed. Ralph Locke and Cyrilla Barr (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997), 295. Locke notes that this stereotype appears in Sinclair Lewis’s Babbitt, in New Yorker cartoons by Helen E. Hokinson, and in the Marx Brothers film A Night at the Opera. Walter Damrosch, the conductor of the New York Symphony, wrote in 1923: “I do not think there has ever been a country whose musical development has been fostered so almost exclusively by women as America”; Damrosch, My Musical Life (New York: Scribner’s, 1926), 323. Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas (London: Hogarth Press, 1938), cited in The Modern Woman Revisited: Paris Between the Wars, ed. Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 15. New York Evening Sun, 13 February 1917, cited in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, No Man’s Land: The Place of the Woman Writer in the Twentieth Century: War of the Words, 3 vols. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988), 1:vii. Julius Meyer-Graefe, Modern Art: Being a Contribution to a New System of Aesthetics, trans. Florence Simmonds and George Chrystal (1908; repr., New York: Arno, 1968), 2–3. Wyndam Lewis, cited in “Rebel Art in Modern Life,” Daily News and Leader, 7 April 1914. Both cited in Christopher Reed, Introduction, in Not at Home: The Suppression of Domesticity in Modern Art and Architecture, ed. Christopher Reed (London: Thomas and Hudson, 1996), 11. John Quinn to Sally Lewis, 2 February 1924, John Quinn Memorial Collection, letterbook 28, 174–75, New York Public Library. On Lewis, see Abbot Low Mills, Sarah Heard Lewis: “Aunt Sally,” pamphlet, February 1982, Oregon Historical Society; “Obituary: Art Enthusiast Sarah Lewis Succumbs at 93,” Oregon Journal, 8 January 1964; “Miss Sally Knew What She Liked,” Oregon Journal, 10 January 1964; “Art Patron Dies at 93,” Oregonian, 8 January 1964; “Granddaughter of Capt. Couch, Sarah Lewis, Art Patron, Dies,” Portland Reporter, 8 January 1964; William J. Chiego, From Oregon Private Collections (Portland, OR: Portland Art Museum, 1977); and Judith Zilczer, “John Quinn and Modern Art Collectors in America, 1913–1924,” American Art Journal, 14 (Winter 1982), 68–69. Judith Zilczer, “The Noble Buyer”: John Quinn, Patron of the Avant-Garde (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1978), 46. Artemas Packard, “A Report on the Development of the Museum of Modern Art Based on a Survey of the Present Organization and Activities of the Museum Conducted during the Years 1935–36,” typescript, 1938, Museum of Modern Art Archives (hereafter MoMA Archives), 88–89.

NOTES

•

263

13. Paul Rosenfeld, “Musical Chronicle: The New, or National, Symphony Orchestra,” The Dial, 69 (December 1920), 670, cited in Carol Oja, “Women Patrons and Activists for Modern Music,” Modernism/Modernity, 4 (January 1997), 145. 14. For a discussion of the equation between aestheticism and disease, see Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 80ª. 15. See Joe L. Dubbert, “Progressivism and the Masculinity Crisis,” in The American Man, ed. Elizabeth H. Pleck and Joseph Pleck (Englewood Cliªs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1980), 303–20, and Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 97ª. On Progressivism as a reform movement, see Robert Wiebe, The Search for Order, 1877–1920 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1967), and Richard L. McCormick, “Evaluating the Progressives,” in Major Problems in the Gilded Age and Progressive Era, ed. Leon Fink (Boston: Houghton Mi›in, 2001), 367–79. 16. See Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 97. 17. Michael Kimmel, “The Contemporary Crisis of Masculinity in Historical Perspective,” in The Making of Masculinities, ed. Harry Brod (Boston: Allen and Unwin, 1987), 121–24 and 137–53. Kimmel also notes that “throughout history, American men have been afraid that others will see them as less than manly, as weak, timid, frightened”; see Kimmel, “Introduction: Toward a History of Manhood in America,” in his Manhood in America: A Cultural History (New York: Free Press, 1996), 6. 18. Alan Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America: Culture and Society in the Gilded Age (New York: Hill and Wang, 1982), 145–46. 19. Kathleen Pyne, Art and the Higher Life: Painting and Evolutionary Thought in Late Nineteenth-Century America (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996), 170–71. 20. Francis Henry Taylor, Pierpont Morgan as Collector and Patron, 1837–1913 (New York: Pierpont Morgan Library, 1957), 7. On Morgan’s many illnesses, see Jean Strouse, Morgan, American Financier (New York: Random House, 1999), 68ª. 21. Samuel Swift, “A Great Art Collection—Some Interesting Facts Concerning the Extraordinary Assemblage of Treasures Which Mr. J. Pierpont Morgan Will Bring to America,” Harper’s Weekly, 2 March 1912, 1. 22. Jean Strouse, “The Unknown J. P. Morgan,” The New Yorker, 29 March 1999, 71. 23. Bonnie Kime Scott, Introduction, in The Gender of Modernism, ed. Scott (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 2. For standard definitions of modernism, see, for instance, Neil Harris, “Cultural Institutions and American Modernization,” in Cultural Excursions: Marketing Appetites and Cultural Tastes in Modern America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), 96–97, and Charles Harrison, “Modernism,” in Critical Terms for Art History, ed. Robert Nelson and Richard Shiª (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 142–55. Susan Stanford Friedman lists seven conflicting definitions proposed by a range of scholars in “Definitional Excursions: The Meanings of Modern/ Modernity/Modernism,” Modernism/Modernity, 8:3 (2001), 493–513. 24. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 10. See also Shari Benstock, Women of the Left Bank: Paris 1900–1940 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1986), and Reclaiming Female Agency: Feminist Art History after Postmodernism, ed. Norma Broude and Mary Garrard (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 25. Felski, Gender of Modernity, 27.

264

•

NOTES

26. See Dianne Sachko Macleod, “The Dialectics of Modernism and English Art,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 35 (January 1995), 1–14. 27. Eleanor Hewitt, The Making of a Modern Museum (New York: Wednesday Afternoon Club, 1919; 3rd ed., New York: Cooper – Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, 1941), 8. See also Elizabeth Bisland, Proposed Plan of the Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, pamphlet, 1896, Cooper Union Library. 28. The Hewitts compiled approximately 450 scrapbooks. See Russell Lynes, More Than Meets the Eye: The History and Collections of the Cooper-Hewitt Museum, the Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of Design (New York: Cooper-Hewitt Museum, 1981), 26. 29. Hewitt, Making of a Modern Museum, 18. 30. Naomi Schor, Reading in Detail: Aesthetics and the Feminine (New York: Methuen, 1987), 4. See also Mary-Elise Haug, “The Life-Cycle of Printed Ephemera: A Case Study of the Maxine Waldron and Thelma Mendsen Collections,” Winterthur Portfolio, 30 (Spring 1995), 59–72. 31. Anne Higonnet, “Private Museums, Public Leadership: Isabella Stewart Gardner and the Art of Cultural Authority,” Fenway Court, 27 (1997), 80. On Taft, see Ruth Krueger Meyer, “The Tafts of Pike Street,” Apollo, 128 (December 1988), 389–93, and The Taft Museum: The History of the Collections and the Baum-Taft House (New York: Hudson Hills Press, 1995). On Bliss, see Susan Tamulevich, Dumbarton Oaks: Garden into Art (New York: Monacelli Press, 2001). 32. See Robert Mehlman, “The ‘Coming of Age’ of Design,” Interiors, August 1976, 84. Women directors included Candace Wheeler, Edith Wharton, and J. P. Morgan’s daughter Anne. Among the male members of the auxiliary were the designer Louis Comfort Tiªany and the collector George Blumenthal. See Special Meeting Council for the Cooper Union Museum, pamphlet, 19 December 1924, Cooper Union Library. 33. Peter Cooper, cited in Carole Klein, Gramercy Park: An American Bloomsbury (Boston: Houghton Mi›in, 1987), 46. Cooper founded the Cooper Union in 1853; the Women’s Art School, founded by Mary Hamilton, merged with the Cooper Union six years later. See Lynes, More Than Meets the Eye, 20–21, and Karen Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Art Associations in America, 1890–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), 21. 34. These were the Badia, Vivés, and Stanislas Baron collections. Although Morgan was ostensibly sharing his love of the decorative arts by donating these collections to the museum, one cannot discount his desire to curry favor with Eleanor and Sarah Hewitt’s father, with whom he was involved in business. The Hewitts also accepted gifts from George A. Hearn, Henry Clews, Ogden Codman, and their relative George Campbell Cooper, among other males. See Lynes, More Than Meets the Eye, 25–32. 35. Lynes, More Than Meets the Eye, 17, 28, and 32–33, and McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 76–77. 36. Susan B. Anthony to Eleanor Hewitt, 16 March 1888, Cooper Union Library. On the Hewitts’ refusal to participate, see Lynes, More Than Meets the Eye, 15. 37. Annual Report of the New York State Association Opposed to the Extension of Suªrage to Women, pamphlet, 1896, Cooper Union Library, 9. 38. Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Henry Holt, 2000), 28–29.

NOTES

•

265

39. Kate Wells, “The Transitional American Woman,” Atlantic Monthly, 47 (December 1880), 818, and Ella Wheeler Wilcox, “The Restlessness of the Modern Woman,” Cosmopolitan, 31 (1901), 317. For recent scholarship on women’s conservative causes, see Kirsten Delegard, “Women’s Movements, 1880s–1920s,” in A Companion to American Women’s History, ed. Nancy A. Hewitt (Oxford: Blackwell, 2002), 328–47. 40. Sandra L. Katz, Dearest of Geniuses: A Life of Theodate Pope Riddle (Windsor, CT: Tidemark Press, 2003), 24. Pope relented to marriage at the age of forty-nine, when she wed John Riddle, a former diplomat (87). 41. Agnes E. Meyer, Out of These Roots: The Autobiography of an American Woman (Boston: Little, Brown, 1953), 68, 98 (early views); 81, 348 (later views); and Agnes Meyer to Charles Freer, 18 August 1914, Agnes E. Meyer Papers, 1907–1970, container 15, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. On Meyer, see also Notable American Women: The Modern Period, ed. Barbara Sicherman and Carol Hurd Green (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980), 471–73, and the biography by her daughter Katharine Meyer Graham, Personal History (New York: Knopf, 1997). See also McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 183–84 and 242. 42. Lois Rudnick, “The Male-Identified Woman and Other Anxieties: The Life of Mabel Dodge Luhan,” in The Challenge of Feminist Biography, ed. Sara Alpert et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 125–26. 43. Meyer, Out of These Roots, 67–70. 44. 291, April 1915, 3. See Douglas Hyland, “Agnes Ernst Meyer, Patron of American Modernism,” American Art Journal, 12 (Winter 1980), 77–78 and 80 (ill.). 45. Hyland, “Agnes Ernst Meyer,” 78–79. 46. McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 83ª. 47. On Dreier, see Notable American Women: The Modern Period, 202–203; Aline Saarinen, The Proud Possessors (1958; repr., New York: Vintage, 1968), 238–49; Robert J. Levy, “Katherine Dreier: Patron of Modern Art,” Apollo, 113 (May 1981), 314–17; Ruth Bohan, The Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition: Katherine Dreier and Modernism in America (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1982); The Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest at Yale University: A Catalogue Raisonné, ed. Robert Herbert et al. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1982); The Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, ed. Jennifer Gross (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006); Susan Galassi, “Crusader for Modernism,” Art News, 83 (September 1984), 92–97; and Carole Gold Calo, “Katherine Dreier: Art Patron with a Social Vision,” in Writings about Art, ed. C. Calo (Englewood Cliªs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1994), 97–103. 48. Bohan, Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition, 58–60. See also Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest, ed. Herbert et al., 1–7, and Amelia Jones, Postmodernism and the[En]gendering of Marcel Duchamp (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 72–76. 49. Katherine Dreier, lecture to the School of the Art League, Brooklyn Museum, 20 November 1927, cited in Bohan, Société Anonyme’s Brooklyn Exhibition, 86. See also Kristina Wilson, “‘One Big Painting’: A New View of Modern Art at the Brooklyn Museum,” Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, ed. Gross, 88. 50. Susan Greenberg, “Art as Experience: Katherine S. Dreier and the Educational Mission of the Société Anonyme,” in Société Anonyme: Modernism for America, ed. Gross, 106–108.

266

•

NOTES

51. Katherine Dreier, 26 April 1921, cited in Greenberg, “Art as Experience,” 99. 52. Jane Addams, Democracy and Social Ethics (New York: Macmillan, 1902), 57. On art at Hull House, see Mary Ann Stankiewicz, “Art at Hull House 1889–1901: Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr,” Women’s Art Journal, 10:1 (1989), 35–39; Helen Horowitz, Culture and the City: Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago from the 1880s to 1917 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976); and Kathleen McCarthy, Noblesse Oblige: Charity and Cultural Philanthropy in Chicago, 1849–1929 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 53. Jane Addams, The Long Road of Woman’s Memory (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 6 and 81. 54. Shannon Jackson, “Civic Play-Housekeeping: Gender, Theatre, and American Reform,” Theatre Journal, 48:3 (1996), 337–61. Jane Addams, “Public Recreation and Social Morality,” Proceedings of the Playground Association of America (1907), 24, cited in Shannon Jackson, Lines of Activity: Performance, Historiography, Hull-House Domesticity (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 213. 55. See, for instance, D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971; repr., London: Routledge, 1996), 51–54. 56. Dreier to William Hekking, 1939, in Société Anonyme and the Dreier Bequest, ed. Herbert et al., 14. 57. Wilson, “‘One Big Painting,’” 75. 58. Mary F. Bednarowski, New Religions and the Theological Imagination in America (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 222. Dreier considered Madame Blavatsky, the founder of the Theosophical Society, “one of the great women of the last century.” See Dreier, “‘Intrinsic Significance’ in Modern Art,” in Three Lectures on Modern Art (New York: Philosophical Library, 1948), 7. 59. Hilary Lips, Sex and Gender: An Introduction (Mountain View, CA: Mayfield, 1993), 31–35. 60. Michael Kimmel, “Introduction: The Power of Gender and the Gender of Power,” in The Material Culture of Gender / The Gender of Material Culture, ed. Katharine Martinez and Kenneth L. Ames (Winterthur, DE: Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, 1997), 2. 61. On Arensberg, see American National Biography Online, http://www.anb.org/articles/ arensberg; Francis Naumann, “Walter Conrad Arensberg: Poet, Patron, and Participant in the New York Avant-Garde, 1915–20,” Philadelphia Museum of Art Bulletin, 76 (Spring 1980), 3–28; Naomi Sawelson-Gorse, “The Art Institute of Chicago and the Arensberg Collection,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, 19 (1993), 80–101, and “Hollywood Conversations: Duchamp and the Arensbergs,” in West Coast Duchamp, ed. Bonnie Clearwater (Miami Beach: Grassfield Press, 1991), 24–45; and The Louise and Walter Arensberg Collection: Twentieth-Century Section (Philadelphia: Philadelphia Museum of Art, 1954). 62. Avis Berman, “An Interview with Katharine Kuh,” Archives of American Art Journal, 27–29 (1987), 27. See also Katharine Kuh, The Open Eye: In Pursuit of Art (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), chap. 9. 63. Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubism and Post-Impressionism (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1914), 134 (original emphasis). On Eddy, see Judith Tolnick, “Collecting American Modernism and Modernists,” in Over Here: Modernism, The First Exile, 1914–1919 (Providence, RI: David Winton Bell Gallery, Brown University, 1989), 48–49, and Paul Kruty, “Arthur Jerome Eddy and His Collection: Prelude and Postscript to the Armory Show,” Arts Magazine, 61 (February 1987), 40–47.

NOTES

•

267

64. Arthur Jerome Eddy, The New Competition (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1913), 41. 65. Chester Dale, cited in Susanna De Vries-Evans, The Lost Impressionists: Masterpieces from Private Collections (Niwot, CO: Roberts Rinehart, 1992), 175. 66. “Dale’s Children,” Time, 80 (28 December 1962), 56. 67. Maud Dale, Picasso (New York: Knopf, 1930), 6. 68. Grant McCracken, cited in Russell Belk and Melanie Wallendorf, “‘Of Mice and Men’: Gender Identity in Collecting,” in Material Culture of Gender, ed. Martinez and Ames, 24. 69. Laura Chasin, cited in Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (New York: Random House, 1993), 332. 70. John D. Rockefeller Jr., cited in Calvin Tomkins, Merchants and Masterpieces: The Story of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Henry Holt, 1970; rev. ed., 1989), 251. See also Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 219, and Frederick Moªatt, “Re-Membering Adam: George Grey Barnard, the John D. Rockefellers, and the Gender of Patronage,” Winterthur Portfolio, 35 (Spring 2000), 70–71. 71. Neurasthenia was diagnosed by Dr. George Miller Beard; see his A Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion (1869; repr., New York: Kraus, 1971). On its relationship to art and collectors, see Joyce Robinson, “‘Hi Honey, I’m Home’: Weary (Neurasthenic) Businessmen and the Formulation of a Serenely Modern Aesthetic,” in Not at Home, ed. Reed, 98–112. On John Rockefeller’s nervous condition, see Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 55, 57, 76, 111–12, and 119. 72. M. H. Baillie Scott, Houses and Gardens (London: G. Newnes, 1906), 53. 73. Henri Matisse, “Notes of a Painter” (1908), in Matisse on Art, trans. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 42. 74. Frank Crowninshield, cited in Raymond Fosdick, John D. Rockefeller, Jr.: A Portrait (New York: Harper, 1956), 329. For an account of the dinner, see Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 302–304. 75. John Rockefeller Jr., cited in Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 345. 76. Brenda Danet and Tamar Katriel, “No Two Alike: Play and Aesthetics in Collecting,” Play and Culture, 2 (1989), 255. 77. Susan Deri, “Transitional Phenomena: Vicissitudes of Symbolization and Creativity,” in Between Reality and Fantasy: Transitional Objects and Phenomena, ed. Simon A. Grolnick, Leonard Barkin, and Werner Muensterberger (New York: Jason Aronson, 1978), 59. 78. John Rockefeller to Abby Rockefeller, April 1931, cited in Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 300. 79. Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 219. 80. Abby Rockefeller to Nelson Rockefeller, 7 January 1928, Gifts to Museum of Modern Art, folder 4–14, MoMA Archives. 81. McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 179–80. 82. See Perlman, Lives, Loves, and Art of Arthur B. Davies, 216. 83. Abby Rockefeller to A. Conger Goodyear, 23 March 1936, History of MOMA by Betty Chamberlain, 1929–39, box 1, folder 5, MoMA Archives. 84. Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, 275.

268

•

NOTES

85. 86.

87.

88. 89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 9 7. 98.

99.

100. 101.

Ibid., 179. Saarinen, Proud Possessors, 197, and A. Conger Goodyear, The Museum of Modern Art: The First Ten Years (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1943), 30–31. On Bliss, see also American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark Carnes, 24 vols. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 3:27–28; Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 2:178–79; The Lillie P. Bliss Collection (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1934); Guy Pène du Bois, “The Lillie P. Bliss Collection,” Arts Magazine, 17 (June 1931), 602–604; John Rewald, Cézanne and America: Dealers, Collectors, Artists and Critics 1891–1921 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1989), 151, 165, and 170; and Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson, interview with Paul Cummings, 1978, microfilm reel 3198, Archives of American Art. Oja, “Women Patrons and Activists,” 130. See also “In Memorial, Franz Kneisel’s Career in America—Concert Master, Quartet Player, Teacher,” The Baton, 7 (April 1926), 7, and Cultivating Music in America, ed. Locke and Barr, 95. Bliss was also a member of the board of directors of the Institute of Musical Arts Auxiliary Society. Monroe Wheeler, “I Remember MoMA,” Art News, 78 (October 1979), 126. “Art Collection of Late Daughter of Cabinet O‹cer Shown in Museum of Modern Art,” New York Times, 15 May 1931. See Notable American Women, 3:408–10; American National Biography, ed. Garraty and Carnes, 21:123–24; Lionello Venturi, “Notes on the Collection of Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan,” Parnassus, 11 (December 1939), 32–33; and Russell Lynes, Good Old Modern: An Intimate Portrait of the Museum of Modern Art (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 7–8. Mary Quinn [Sullivan], Planning and Furnishing the Home: Practical and Economical Suggestions for the Homemaker (New York: Harper, 1914), 40. Quinn was quoting Edmond de Goncourt; see Lynes, Good Old Modern, 44. On Josephine Boardman Crane, see ibid., 13–14, and Christie’s Magazine, May 1998, 56–57. Lynes, Good Old Modern, 14. Glenway Westcott to Josephine Boardman Crane, 28 December 1944, Monroe Wheeler and Glenway Westcott Papers, Beinecke Library, Yale University. Cecil Roberts, And So to America (New York: Doubleday, 1947), 162–63. Meyer Schapiro, “The Armory Show” (1952), in Modern Art: Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: Selected Papers (New York: Braziller, 1982), 162. Abby Rockefeller to A. Conger Goodyear, 12 July 1929, A. Conger Goodyear Papers, vol. 1, MoMA Archives. Barr was recommended by Paul Sachs, with whom he had studied at Harvard. On his appointment, see Lynes, Good Old Modern, 22ª. Abby Rockefeller to Alfred Barr, 23 August 1929, and Frank Crowninshield to A. Conger Goodyear, 4 September 1929, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Correspondence, Rockefeller Family Papers, RG2, ser. 1, box 7, folders 87 and 98, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY (hereafter RAC). Brook S. Mason, interview with Eleanor Lambert, The Art Newspaper, 114 (May 2001), 60. Quinn, Planning and Furnishing the Home, 142.

NOTES

•

269

102.

103.

104. 105. 106.

107. 108. 109.

110.

1 1 1. 112.

113. 114. 1 15. 116. 117. 118.

Ibid., 54. For an analysis of Sullivan’s philosophy, see Deborah Gangwer, “First Ladies: The Founders of MoMA and the American Avant-Garde” (master’s thesis, University of California, Davis, 2000). Abby Rockefeller to William R. Valentiner, 23 August 1930, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Papers, Rockefeller Family Papers, RG2, ser. 1, box 5, folder 74, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. Elsie de Wolfe, The House in Good Taste (1913; repr., New York: Century, 1920), 17. See also Jane S. Smith, Elsie de Wolfe: A Life in the High Style (New York: Atheneum, 1982). De Wolfe, House in Good Taste, 5. Peter McNeil claims that women dominated the field until the 1930s; see his “Designing Women: Gender, Sexuality and the Interior Decorator,” Art History, 17 (December 1994), 631–32. Frank Alvah Parsons, Interior Decoration: Its Principles and Practice (1915; repr., New York: Doubleday, 1920), vii (original emphasis). Barr, cited in Lynes, Good Old Modern, 16. Le Courbusier, The Decorative Art of Today (Art décoratif d’aujourd’hui), trans. James Dunnett. (1925; repr., London: Architectural Press, 1987), xxi and 134–35. See Tag Gronberg, “Décoration: Modernism’s ‘Other,’” Art History, 15 (December 1992), 551. See also Reed, Introduction, in Not at Home, ed. Reed, 10, and Valerie Jaudon and Joyce Kozloª, “Art Hysterical Notions of Progress and Culture,” Heresies, 1:4 (Winter 1977–78), 38–42, reprinted in Theories and Documents of Contemporary Art, ed. Kristine Stiles and Peter Selz (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 154–64. Museum of Modern Art, Modern Architecture: International Exhibition (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1932); Henry Russell Hitchcock and Philip Johnson, The International Style (1932; repr., New York: Norton, 1996), 93. See also Alice T. Friedman, “Domestic Diªerences: Edith Farnsworth, Mies van der Rohe, and the Gendered Body,” in Not at Home, ed. Reed, 190–91. On Loos, Le Corbusier, and Hitchcock and Johnson’s International Style exhibition, see Felicity Scott, “From Industrial Art to Design: The Purchase of Domesticity at MoMA, 1929–59,” Lotus: Architectural Annual, 9 (1998), 106–43. Philip Johnson, cited in Scott, “From Industrial Art to Design,” 109. Aline Meyer Liebman to A. Conger Goodyear, 18 December 1933, cited in Margaret Liebman Berger, Aline Meyer Liebman: Pioneer Collector and Artist (New York: W. F. Humphrey, 1982), 69–70. Reed, Introduction, in Not at Home, ed. Reed, 16. Alfred Barr, Introduction, in Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1936), 12. Packard, “Report on the Development of the Museum of Modern Art,” 88–89. The phrase is Christine Stansell’s; see her American Moderns, 34. See also Lisa Tickner, “Men’s Work? Masculinity and Modernism,” Diªerences, 4:3 (1992), 7–8. See Sybil Gordon Kantor, Alfred H. Barr, Jr. and the Intellectual Origins of the Museum of Modern Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 357–61. Janet Wolª, “Women at the Whitney, 1910–30: Feminism/Sociology/Aesthetics,”

270

•

NOTES

119.

120. 121. 122. 123.

124. 125.

126.

127. 128. 129. 130.

131.

Modernism/Modernity, 6 (September 1999), 128. For a similar assessment, see Carol Duncan, “The Modern Art Museum: It’s a Man’s World,” in her Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995), 102. On Rebay, see Dore Ashton, “Naissance d’un Grand Musée,” XX Siècle, 31 (1968), 137–39; Lawrence Campbell, “The Museum of Non-Objective Painting Revisited,” Art News, December 1972, 40–41; Katharine Kuh, “The Vision of Hilla Rebay,” New York Times, 7 May 1972; Joan Lukach, Hilla Rebay: Search for the Spirit in Art (New York: Braziller, 1983); and Art of Tomorrow: Hilla Rebay and Solomon R. Guggenheim, ed. JoAnne Danzker et al. (New York: Guggenheim Museum, 2005). New York Herald Tribune, 29 November 1954. Lukach, Hilla Rebay, 47. Irene Guggenheim to Hilla Rebay, n.d., letter on stationery of Grand Hotel, Vittel, Hilla Rebay Archive, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archive. Rebay’s friendly correspondence with Irene Guggenheim abruptly ended in 1932, perhaps as a result of Rebay’s growing influence over Solomon Guggenheim. Lukach is anxious to dispel rumors that Rebay was Solomon’s mistress in order to draw attention to the significant contributions she made as an artist, theorist, and museum founder. However, their correspondence contains an element of intimacy and secrecy. On one occasion Guggenheim regrets having left “Dear Hillachen” in Paris. On another he cautions her to “make satisfactory arrangements to have all letters returned to New York after your departure. You ought to be more careful in addressing cables and letters.” MSS letters, n.d., Hilla Rebay Archive, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archive. Kuh, “Vision of Hilla Rebay.” On the Museum of Non-Objective Painting, see Jo-Anne Danzker, “The Art of Tomorrow,” in Art of Tomorrow, ed. Danzker et al., 176–90. Hilla Rebay, “A Short Survey from Objectivity to Non-Objectivity in Painting,” in Art of Tomorrow: Bauer, Kandinsky, Rebay; Exhibition of Non-Objective Painting (Lakeland, FL: Florida Southern College, 1955), unpaginated. On Rebay’s relationship with Dreier, see Lukach, Hilla Rebay, 226–33. See Paul Weideger, “From the Abstract to the Cosmic: Hilla Rebay and the Creation of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Collection of Non-Objective Art,” in Before Peggy Guggenheim: American Women Art Collectors, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorai (Venice: Marsilio, 2001), 191. “The Beauty of Non-Objectivity,” typescript of lecture delivered on 23 May 1944, Hilla Rebay Archive, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archive, 29. On Rebay and Whitney, see Lukach, Hilla Rebay, 47–48. Blair, Torchbearers, 9. Marcel Duchamp, cited in McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 227. On European artists’ fascination with America, see Wanda Corn, The Great American Thing: Modern Art and National Identity, 1915–1935 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999). Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, “Journals,” 17 November 1907, cited in McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 224. On Whitney, see Memorial Exhibition: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1943); Bernard Harper Friedman,

NOTES

•

271

132. 133. 134. 135.

136.

137.

138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144.

145. 146.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney: A Biography (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1978); Avis Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art (New York: Atheneum, 1990); Flora Miller Biddle, The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made (New York: Arcade, 1990); and Wolª, “Women at the Whitney.” Hutchins Hapgood, A Victorian in the Modern World (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1939), 152. See June Sochen, The New Woman in Greenwich Village (New York: Quadrangle, 1971), 47. Warren Susman, Culture as History: The Transformation of American Society in the Twentieth Century (New York: Pantheon, 1973; repr., 1984), 276. On short hair and trousers as indicators of female liberation, see my “Cross-Cultural Cross-Dressing: Class, Gender and Modernist Sexual Identity,” in Orientalism Transposed: The Impact of the Colonies on British Culture, ed. Julie F. Codell and Dianne Sachko Macleod (London: Ashgate Press, 1998), 63–85; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 179; and Whitney Chadwick and Tirza True Latimer, “Gender and Sexual Identity after World War I,” in Modern Woman Revisited, ed. Chadwick and Latimer, 3. Whitney, “Journals,” 24 August 1906, cited in McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 218. On Whitney’s lesbian crush, see Kennedy Fraser, “Love and Struggle: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney,” in Frames of Reference: Looking at American Art, 1900–1950, ed. Beth Venn and Adam D. Weinberg (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1999), 28. Elizabeth Cady Stanton, “On Labor and Free Love: Two Unpublished Speeches of Elizabeth Cady Stanton,” ed. Ellen Dubois, Signs, 1 (Autumn 1975), 266. See Ellen Kay Trimberger, “The New Woman and the New Sexuality: Conflict and Contradiction in the Writings and Lives of Mabel Dodge and Neith Boyce,” in 1915, The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art and the New Theatre in America, ed. Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 105. Whitney, “Journals,” 1901, cited in Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 181. Oja, “Women Patrons and Activists,” 131–34. Wolª, “Women at the Whitney,” 117–38. Berman, Rebels on Eighth Street, 279. Friedman, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 539. L. J. Webb [Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney], Walking the Dusk (New York: Coward-McCann, 1932), 33. “Whitney Museum to Be Opening Today,” New York Times, 17 November 1931. On Whitney’s interior scheme and the feminization of her museum space, see Evelyn Hankins, “En/Gendering the Whitney’s Collection of American Art,” in Acts of Possession: Collecting in America, ed. Leah Dilworth (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003), 163–89. Gillian Brown, Domestic Individualism: Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 4. Forbes Watson, cited in Juliana Force and American Art: A Memorial Exhibition (New York: Whitney Museum of American Art, 1949), 59.

272

•

NOTES

147. 148.

“Hilla Rebay Chronology,” in Art of Tomorrow, ed. Danzker et al., 248. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 245–46.

CHAPTER 5: THE SEXING OF TASTE

1.

Although Leo Stein disputes that he was influenced by his reading of Benedetto Croce’s Estetica come scienze dell’espressione e linguistica generale in 1902, his notion of organicity resembles the Italian theoretician’s concept of “organic unity,” which held that an object could only be apprehended as an organic whole rather than through an examination of its individual parts. Croce also maintained that an object did not have to be considered a work of art to be worthy of contemplation. See M. E. Moss, Benedetto Croce Reconsidered: Truth and Error in Theories of Art, Literature, and History (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1987), 45–46, and The Legacy of Benedetto Croce: Contemporary Critical Views, ed. Jack D’Amico et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999). 2. Fernande Olivier, Picasso et ses amis (Paris: Delmain et Boutelleau, 1933), 101. On Stein’s lesbianism, see Catharine Stimpson, “Gertrude Stein and the Lesbian Lie,” in American Women’s Biography: Fea(s)ts of Memory, ed. Margo Culley (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992), 152–66, and Brenda Wineapple, Sister Brother: Gertrude and Leo Stein (New York: G. P. Putnam’s, 1996), 472. 3. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Knopf, 1985), 280–81. 4. On second-generation New Women, see ibid., 177ª. 5. Mary Ryan, Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), 58–94. 6. Henry James, “Americans Abroad,” The Nation, 3 October 1878, 208. 7. Madame Theresa Blanc [Theresa Bentzon], The Condition of Woman in the United States: A Traveller’s Notes, trans. Abby Langdon Alger (1895; repr., Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1972), 17–18. 8. See Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 79–88. For an analysis of this argument, see Beth Newman, Subjects on Display: Psychoanalysis, Social Expectation, and Victorian Femininity (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2004). On the role of American women as ambassadors, see Mary Suzanne Schriber, Writing Home: American Women Abroad 1830–1920 (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1997), 34–35. 9. Pierre de Coulevain, Noblesse américaine (Paris: Charpentier, 1884), cited in Rémy Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 79. 10. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories: Movers and Shakers (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), 6. 1 1. Ellen Hirschland and Nancy Ramage, “Bucking the Tide: The Cone Sisters of Baltimore,” Journal of the History of Collections, 8:1 (1996), 104. 12. Ottoline: The Early Memoirs of Lady Ottoline Morrell, ed. Robert Gathorne-Hardy (London: Faber and Faber, 1963), 187.

NOTES

•

273

13. Leo Stein to Mabel Weeks, 20 December 1901, cited in Irene Gordon, “A World Beyond the World: The Discovery of Leo Stein,” in Four Americans in Paris: The Collections of Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 21. 14. Leo Stein, Journey into the Self, ed. Edmund Fuller (New York: Crown, 1950), 195. 15. Bill Brown, A Sense of Things: The Object Matter of American Literature (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 13. 16. Leo Stein, Appreciation: Painting, Poetry and Prose (New York: Random House, 1947), viii. 17. See Louise Levesque-Lopman, Claiming Reality: Phenomenology and Women’s Experience (Totowa, NJ: Rowman and Littlefield, 1998), 16. 18. Leo Stein, Journey into the Self, 318. 19. Gertrude Stein, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933; repr., New York: Vintage, 1990), 87. 20. Robert Lubar, “Unmasking Pablo’s Gertrude: Queer Desire and the Subject of Portraiture,” Art Bulletin, 79 (March 1997), 66. See also Margot Norris, “The ‘Wife’ and the ‘Genius’: Domesticating Modern Art in Stein’s Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas,” in Modernism, Gender, and Culture: A Cultural Studies Approach, ed. Lisa Rado (New York: Garland, 1997), 79–99. I find no evidence, however, to support Norris’s contention that Stein encouraged Toklas’s domesticity in response to “violent and masculinist artistic movements” such as Vorticism and Futurism (92). 21. Leo Stein, The A-B-C of Aesthetics (New York: Boni and Liveright, 1927), 260, 262, and 264. 22. Alfred Barr, Matisse: His Art and His Public (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1951), 57. 23. Leo Stein, Appreciation, 157, and Barr, Matisse, 58. 24. Leo Stein, Journey into the Self, 148. Wineapple notes that Toklas never disputed this claim; see her Brother Sister, 216. On Leo as the primary collector, see also Aline Saarinen, The Proud Possessors (1958; repr., New York: Vintage, 1968), 175, and Gordon, “World Beyond the World,” 13–33. 25. Gertrude Stein, What Are Master-pieces and Why There Are So Few of Them (New York: Pitam, 1940), 98. See also Leon Katz, “Matisse, Picasso and Gertrude Stein,” in Four Americans in Paris, 51–63. 26. Lubar, “Unmasking Pablo’s Gertrude,” 56–84. 27. Gertrude Stein, Picasso: The Complete Writings, ed. Edward Burns (Boston: Beacon, 1985), 27. See also Jane P. Bowers, “Experiment in Time and Process of Discovery: Picasso Paints Gertrude Stein; Gertrude Stein Makes Sentences,” Harvard Library Bulletin, 5 (Summer 1994), 12. 28. James Lord, Six Exceptional Women (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1994), 9. 29. Gertrude Stein, Gertrude Stein on Picasso, ed. Edward Burns (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1970), 97. See also Barbara Will, Gertrude Stein, Modernism, and the Problem of Genius (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000). 30. Brenda Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta: The Cone Collection of the Baltimore Museum of Art (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 1985), 66.

274

•

NOTES

31. Otto Weininger, Sex and Character (New York: Putnam, 1906), 48 and 64–66. See also Chandak Sengoopta, Otto Weininger: Sex, Science, and Self in Imperial Vienna (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000), and Christine Battersby, Gender and Genius: Towards a Feminist Aesthetic (London: Women’s Press, 1989). On lesbian identity, see Sue-Ellen Case, “Towards a Butch-Femme Aesthetic,” Discourse, 11:1 (Fall–Winter 1988–89), 55–73. 32. See Linda Wagner-Martin, Favored Strangers: Gertrude Stein and Her Family (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996). 33. Gertrude Stein, cited in Wineapple, Sister Brother, 355. 34. Leo Stein, Journey into the Self, 149. 35. See Valerie Sanders, The Brother-Sister Culture in Nineteenth-Century Literature (New York: Palgrave, 2003), and Juliet Mitchell, Siblings: Sex and Violence (Cambridge: Polity, 2003). 36. The standard sources for Dodge’s life are her four-volume memoir, Intimate Memories (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933–37), and Lois Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan: New Woman, New Worlds (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1994). 37. Mabel Dodge to Gertrude Stein, cited in Donald Gallup, The Flowers of Friendship: Letters Written to Gertrude Stein (New York: Knopf, 1953), 72. 38. Dodge, Intimate Memories: European Experiences, 322. 39. Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan, 17, and Winifred Frazier, Mabel Dodge Luhan (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 3. 40. Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan, 31. Rudnick notes that Dodge’s depression lifted “when her creative energies were aroused.” See also Lois Rudnick, “The Male-Identified Woman and Other Anxieties: The Life of Mabel Dodge Luhan,” in The Challenge of Feminist Biography, ed. Sara Alpert et al. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1992), 117. 41. Dodge, European Experiences, 152 and 161. 42. Gertrude Stein, “Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia,” in Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein, ed. Carl Van Vechten (New York: Modern Library, 1962), 530. 43. Leo Stein, Journey into the Self, 190. 44. Dodge, European Experiences, 174. 45. Ibid., 321–22. 46. Jessica Benjamin, Like Subjects, Love Objects: Essays on Recognition and Sexual Diªerence (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1995), 1–7. 47. Dodge, European Experiences, 174. 48. Oscar Wilde, The Portrait of Dorian Gray (1890; repr., London: Penguin, 1985), 134. 49. Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan, 20 and 52, and Dodge, European Experiences, 238. 50. Jo Davidson, Between Sittings: An Informal Autobiography (New York: Dial, 1951), 82. 51. Michael Camille, “Editor’s Introduction: Objects of Desire,” Art History, 24 (April 2001), 163–64. 52. Dodge, European Experiences, 154. 53. See, for instance, her accounts of her aªairs with the Frenchwomen Marcelle and Marguerite, in her European Experiences, 213–24 and 277ª. On her flirtation with Stein, see her European Experiences, 332, and Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan, 57. 54. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 136–41.

NOTES

•

275

55. Dodge, European Experiences, 238 and 96. 56. See D. W. Winnicott, Playing and Reality (1971; repr., London: Routledge, 1996), 38ª; R. D. Hinshelwood, A Dictionary of Kleinian Thought (London: Free Assocation Books, 1991), 263–64; and C. Fred Alford, Melanie Klein and Critical Social Theory: An Account of Politics, Art, and Reason Based on Her Psychoanalytic Theory (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989), 115–16. 57. Elsie Clews Parsons, The Old-Fashioned Woman: Primitive Fancies about the Sex (New York: Putnam’s, 1913). On Parsons, see Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 3:20–23, and Desley Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons: Inventing Modern Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997). 58. See Ellen Kay Trimberger, “The New Woman and the New Sexuality: Conflict and Contradiction in the Writings and Lives of Mabel Dodge and Neith Boyce,” in 1915, The Cultural Moment: The New Politics, the New Woman, the New Psychology, the New Art and the New Theatre in America, ed. Adele Heller and Lois Rudnick (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991), 98–115, and Nina Miller, “The Bonds of Free Love: Constructing the Female Bohemian Self,” Genders, 11 (Fall 1991), 38–40. 59. Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons, xiii. 60. See Mancha Madison Clews, Once upon a Time at La Napoule: The Memoirs of Marie Clews (Beverly, MA: Memoirs Unlimited, 1998), and Deacon, Elsie Clews Parsons, 115. 61. Elsie Clews Parsons, Journal of a Feminist (Bristol: Thoemmes, 1994), 91. 62. Dodge, cited in Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 284. On Dodge and the Heterodoxy Club, see Christine Stansell, American Moderns: Bohemian New York and the Creation of a New Century (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2000), 90, and Dodge, Intimate Memories: Movers and Shakers, 143–44. 63. Dodge, Movers and Shakers, 3, 14–15, 5–6, and 150–51. See also Patricia R. Everett, Mabel Dodge Luhan: The Salon Years, 1913–1917 (New York: Barbara Mathes Gallery, 1985). 64. Dodge, Movers and Shakers, 37. On her contribution to the Armory Show, see Milton W. Brown, The Story of the Armory Show (New York: Joseph Hirshhorn Foundation, 1963), 216–17 and 311. 65. Dodge, Movers and Shakers, 36. 66. See Elizabeth Louise Kahn, “Engendering a Scandal: The Cubist House and the Private Spaces of Modernity,” in Modernism, Gender, and Culture, ed. Lisa Rado (New York: Garland, 1997), 178. The painting Dodge lent to the Armory Show was by Charles Conder; see Brown, Story of the Armory Show, 311. 67. Mabel Dodge, “Speculations, or Post-Impressionism in Prose,” in Association of American Painters and Sculptors, The Armory Show, International Exhibition of Modern Art, 1913, ed. Bernard Karpel, 3 vols. (New York: Arno Press, 1972), 3:173. 68. Arts and Decoration, March 1913, and Camera Work, June 1913, 6–9; Dodge, Movers and Shakers, 36 and 146. See also Rudnick, Mabel Dodge Luhan, 67–71. 69. Leo Stein, Journey into the Self, 50. 70. Even Dodge’s fellow Greenwich Village cohorts had reservations about her: Walter Lippmann thought she lacked intellectual rigor, while the writer Mary Heaton Vorse refused

276

•

NOTES

to take her seriously, dismissing her as “a rich woman amusing herself.” Rudnick, “MaleIdentified Woman,” 121–22. 71. Stansell, American Moderns, 108. 72. Emily Chadbourne to Gertrude Stein, n.d. [c. 1913], Gertrude Stein Correspondence, Yale Collection of American Literature, YCAL MSS 76 f. 1952, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University. 73. See Abigail Loomis and Franklin Court, “Richard Teller Crane’s War with the Colleges,” Chicago History, 11 (1982), 204–13. 74. Dr. Margaret Gildea, “Notes Dictated by Margaret Crane-Lillie Gildea about Emily Crane Chadbourne and Other Members of the Crane Family,” September 1978, Crane-Lillie Family Papers, Chicago Historical Society. 75. Dodge, European Experiences, 291. See Daniel W. Stowell, ed., In Tender Consideration: Women, Families, and the Law in Abraham Lincoln’s Illinois (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002). 76. Chadbourne to Stein, n.d. (“Friday”), Stein Correspondence, Yale Collection of American Literature, YCAL MSS 76 f. 1952, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; Gertrude Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 126. Prichard had a short and controversial career at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston; see Letters of Roger Fry, ed. Denys Sutton (London: Chatto and Windus, 1972), 2:742, and Barr, Matisse, 105. 77. Saarinen, Proud Possessors, 52–53; Kathleen McCarthy, Women’s Culture: American Philanthropy and Art, 1830–1930 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 172–73; and Louise Hall Tharp, Mrs. Jack: A Biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner (New York: Peter Weed, 1965), 280–81. Chadbourne valued the tapestries at $8,000, and when customs agents confiscated them and appraised them at $82,000, she oªered to pay the fine, but Gardner stepped forward, insisting it was her own responsibility. 78. Peter Stansky, On or about December 1910: Early Bloomsbury and Its Intimate World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 195. 79. William Rothenstein, Men and Memories (New York: Tudor, 1937), 172; Miranda Seymour, Ottoline Morrell: Life on the Grand Scale (London: Hodder and Staughton, 1992), 88. 80. Ottoline, ed. Gathorne-Hardy, 187–89. See also Frances Spalding, Roger Fry: Art and Life (London: Granada, 1980), 140. 81. Gildea, “Emily Crane Chadbourne,” 8. 82. Thomas Chadbourne, Autobiography of Thomas L. Chadbourne, ed. Charles Goetsch and Margaret Shivers (New York: Oceana, 1985), 33. On Chadbourne’s personality and relationship with her father, see Gildea, “Emily Crane Chadbourne,” 11–15. 83. See Beinecke Library digital image archive, items 1013553 and 1013555, http://beinecke .library.yale.edu/dl_crosscollex/. On Foujita, see Jean Selz, Foujita, trans. Shirley Jennings (New York: Crown, 1981), and Phyllis Birnbaum, Glory in a Line: A Life of Foujita (New York: Faber and Faber, 2006). 84. See Eunice Lipton, Alias Olympia: A Woman’s Search for Manet’s Notorious Model and Her Own Desire (New York: Scribner’s, 1992). 85. Gildea, “Emily Crane Chadbourne,” 19. 86. Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 170. For a full account of La Motte’s and Borden’s

NOTES

•

277

87. 88. 89. 90. 91.

92.

93. 94.

95.

96. 97. 98. 99.

experiences, see Nurses at the Front: Writing the Wounds of the Great War, ed. Margaret R. Higonnet (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001). The relation to female modernism is discussed in Angela K. Smith, The Second Battlefield: Women, Modernism, and the First World War (New York: Manchester University Press, 2000). See, for instance, Ellen Newbold La Motte, The Opium Monopoly (New York: Macmillan, 1920) and The Ethics of Opium (New York: Century, 1924). Evelyn Waugh, Remote People (1931; repr., London: Methuen, 1991), 33. Evelyn Waugh, Black Mischief (London: Chapman and Hall, 1932), 203 and 218. See also Jacqueline McDonnell, Waugh on Women (London: Duckworth, 1986), 106. “Collection Lists,” Emily Crane Chadbourne files 3–6 and 3–7, Art Institute of Chicago Archive. Memo from C. H. Burkholder, 20 December 1926, Emily Crane Chadbourne file 3–6, Art Institute of Chicago Archive. On the Antiquarian Society, see McCarthy, Women’s Culture, 132. Leigh Rehner Jones, “Master Plan for Senate House State Historic Site,” typescript, October 1984, Senate House, Kingston, NY, 48. In addition to her gifts to the Art Institute of Chicago and Senate House Museum, Chadbourne made gifts to the Museum for the Arts of Decoration at the Cooper Union, Mount Vernon, the Naval Historical Foundation, and the Corning Museum of Glass, also donating almost two hundred Japanese woodcut prints to the Library of Congress. See Winifred E. Howe, “John Vanderlyn’s Panoramas in the Rotunda,” Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, 7 (August 1912), 148–49. John Vanderlyn to John Vanderlyn Jr., 26 April 1840, cited in Salvatore Mondello, The Private Papers of John Vanderlyn (1775–1852), American Portrait Painter (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 1990), 116. See also Exhibition of the Work of John Vanderlyn (Kingston, NY: Senate House Museum, 1938). Barbara Pollack, The Collectors: Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone (Indianapolis: BobbsMerrill, 1962); Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta; Edward T. Cone, “The Miss Etta Cones, the Steins, and M’sieu Matisse: A Memoir,” American Scholar, 42 (Summer 1973), 441–60; Ellen B. Hirschland, “The Cone Sisters and the Stein Family,” in Four Americans in Paris, 75–86; and Hirschland and Ramage, “Bucking the Tide,” 103–16. Etta Cone, “Travel Diary,” 15 September 1901, Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Archive, Baltimore Museum of Art. Ibid., 8 October 1901. See James R. Mellow, Charmed Circle: Gertrude Stein and Company (New York: Avon, 1975), 70–71, and Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 63. Etta Cone, “Travel Diary,” 5 June 1901, cited in Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 57. Edward Cone, “Miss Etta Cones,” 457. Leo Stein’s concept of tactile values was undoubtedly influenced by his talks with Bernard Berenson at this time. Both had attended Harvard University, where William James lectured on psychological perception. See Ernest Samuels, Bernard Berenson: The Making of a Connoisseur (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979), 284. Etta Cone had read Berenson, and both sisters had attended courses in aesthetics at Johns Hopkins University. See George Boas, “‘The Cones’: Speech Delivered at Opening of Cone Memorial Exhibition,” typescript, 13 January 1950, Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Archive, Baltimore Museum of Art, 7.

278

•

NOTES

100.

101. 102.

103. 104. 105. 106. 107. 108. 109. 1 10.

1 1 1. 112. 1 13. 114. 1 15. 116.

1 17. 118.

On Leo Stein’s influence on the Cone sisters, see Katz, “Matisse, Picasso, and Gertrude Stein,” 51–52. Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 53–58, and Edward Cone, “Miss Etta Cones,” 457. Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 58. See Jay Fisher, “Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta Cone: A Collection of Modern Art for Baltimore,” in Before Peggy Guggenheim: American Women Art Collectors, ed. Rosella Mamoli Zorzi (Venice: Marsilio, 2001), 114, and Jack Flam, Matisse in the Cone Collection: The Poetics of Vision (Baltimore: Baltimore Museum of Art, 2001). Gertrude Stein, Two Women, cited in Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 23–25. Matisse to Simon Bussy, 24 May 1934, cited in Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 124. Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 112. Claribel Cone to Etta Cone, 18 August 1927, cited in Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 117. Stein, Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 37. Boas, “‘The Cones,’” 2. Claribel Cone to Etta Cone, 2 September 1924, cited in Hirschland and Ramage, “Bucking the Tide,” 108. Claribel Cone, interview, Baltimore Sun, 15 April 1928. On the objects she wore, see Arnold Lehman, Foreword, in Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 10, and Saarinen, Proud Possessors, 186. Claribel Cone to Etta Cone, 16 March 1920, cited in Hirschland and Ramage, “Bucking the Tide,” 108. Matisse, “Notes of a Painter” (1908), in Matisse on Art, trans. Jack Flam (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), 42. Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 65–66 and 147, and Edward Cone, “Miss Etta Cones,” 456. Richardson, Dr. Claribel and Miss Etta, 15–16. Adelyn Breeskin, interview with Paul Cummings, 27 June 1974, Archives of American Art, http://archivesofamericanart.si.edu/oralhist/breesk74.htm. At the behest of her sister-in-law, Laura Weil Cone, Etta Cone added a bequest to her will favoring the Weatherspoon Art Museum at the Woman’s College in Greensboro, North Carolina (now part of the University of North Carolina). The bequest consisted of sixty-seven prints and six bronzes by Matisse, and a number of prints and drawings by other artists, including Picasso, Félix Vallotton, Raoul Dufy, and John Graham. These items were culled from the Cone collection by a committee selected by Etta before her death. Its members included Laura Cone and the director and president of the board of trustees of the Baltimore Museum of Art, among others. See Mary Gabriel, The Art of Acquiring: A Portrait of Etta and Claribel Cone (Baltimore: Bancroft Press, 2002), 215, and http://weatherspoon.uncg.edu/collections/cone. See Jordanna Bailkin, The Culture of Property: The Crisis of Liberalism in Modern Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004). The phrase is Helen Knibb’s; see her “‘Present but Not Visible’: Searching for Women’s History in Museum Collections,” Gender and History, 6:3 (November 1994), 352–69.

NOTES

•

279

119. 120.

See also Carol Duncan, “The Modern Art Museum: It’s a Man’s World,” in her Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (London: Routledge, 1995), 102–32. Claribel Cone to Etta Cone, 2 September 1924, cited in Hirschland and Ramage, “Bucking the Tide,” 108. Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly Conduct, 296.

EPILOGUE: MODERNIST NOSTALGIA

1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6. 7.

8.

Svetlana Boym, The Future of Nostalgia (New York: Basic Books, 2001), xiii–xvii. I am indebted to the participants in the seminar I led on modernist nostalgia at the Modernist Studies Association annual meeting in Chicago in 2005 for clarifying my thinking on this topic, especially Emily Lutenski and Christy Burns for the references to Mabel Dodge in Taos and Frederic Jameson cited below. Carol Troyen, “After Stieglitz: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Taste for Modern Art in America,” in Theodore E. Stebbins Jr. and Carol Troyen, The Lane Collection: TwentiethCentury Paintings in the American Tradition (Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1983), 42. On the folk art purchases Rockefeller made through the dealer Edith Halpert, see also Lindsay Pollock, The Girl with the Gallery: Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market (New York: Public Aªairs, 2006). Rockefeller’s collection of folk art is housed at Colonial Williamsburg. See Nina Little, The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Collection (Boston: Little, Brown, 1957), and American Folk Portraits: Paintings and Drawings from the Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center, ed. Beatrix Rumford (New York: New York Graphic Society, 1981). Bliss conceived the garden as an extension of the house’s collections and library. She maintained that “gardens shall have their place in the humanist order of life.” See Linda Lott and James Carder, Garden Ornament at Dumbarton Oaks (Washington, DC: Dumbarton Oaks, 2001), 31–32, and Susan Tamulevich, Dumbarton Oaks: Garden into Art (New York: Monacelli, 2001). Susan Ware, Holding Their Own: American Women in the 1930s (Boston: Twayne, 1982), 87ª. Rita Felski, The Gender of Modernity (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 39 and 16. For other interpretations of nostalgia, see Jean Starobinski, “The Idea of Nostalgia,” Diogenes, 54 (1996), 81–103, and Ann Colley, Nostalgia and Recollection in Victorian Culture (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998). T. Jackson Lears, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture 1880–1920 (New York: Pantheon, 1981), xix. See Women Building Chicago 1790–1990, ed. Rima Lunin Schultz and Adele Hast (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001), 548–50; Notable American Women: A Biographical Dictionary, ed. Edward T. James et al., 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 2:452–54; and Stephen Birmingham, The Grandes Dames (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1982), 125–51. I have used a conversion factor of .093; see “Conversion Price Index,” http://oregonstate.edu/Dept/pol_sci/fac/sahr/cv2003.pdf. Edith Rockefeller McCormick, interview with Mary Dougherty, “Life as It Seemed to Me,” New York Evening Journal, 2 September 1932.

280

•

NOTES

9. On Smith and the discourse on luxury, see Dianne Sachko Macleod, Art and the Victorian Middle Class: Money and the Making of Cultural Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 10–11. Catharine Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe, The American Woman’s Home (1869; repr., New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2002), 179. 10. Edith Rockefeller McCormick, interview, “Burglars Ransack Home of Mrs. Rockefeller McCormick,” Chicago Tribune, undated clipping, Mrs. Howard Fowler McCormick Biography file, Chicago Historical Society. S. M. Melamed, “Edith Rockefeller McCormick’s Intellectual Personality,” O‹ce of Messrs Rockefeller General Files, Rockefeller Family Papers, box 80, folder 608, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, NY (hereafter RAC). 11. Clarice Stasz, The Rockefeller Women: Dynasty of Piety, Privacy, and Service (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 110. 12. McCormick, interview, “Life as It Seemed to Me.” On her factory plans, see Stasz, Rockefeller Women, 217. 13. Stasz, Rockefeller Women, 107–109, and Bernice Kert, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller: The Woman in the Family (New York: Random House, 1993), 112. 14. Havelock Ellis, Man and Woman, cited in Julie Anne Springer, “Art and the Feminine Muse: Women in Interiors by John White Alexander,” Woman’s Art Journal, 6:2 (Fall 1985–Winter 1986), 2–4. 15. Eleanor Page, “This Was 1000 Lake Shore Drive—Before High Rises,” Chicago Tribune, 19 September 1965. 16. On Parson and Stotesbury, see James T. Maher, The Twilight of Splendor: Chronicles of the Age of American Palaces (Boston: Little, Brown, 1975). On Post, see Nancy Rubin, American Empress: The Life and Times of Marjorie Merriweather Post (New York: Villard, 1995). On Dodge, see Detroit Institute of Arts, The Dodge Collection of Furniture and EighteenthCentury Art in the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit: Hudson Hills, 1996). See also Allen Kurzeil, “Cult of the Queen,” Art and Antiques, October 1993, 69–73. 17. Gabriel P. Weisberg, Women of Fashion: Images of Leisure and Class in French and American Painting 1880–1990 (Tokyo: Art Life, 1994), 1, and Weisberg, “From Paris to Pittsburgh: Visual Culture and American Taste, 1880–1910,” in Gabriel P. Weisberg, DeCourcy E. McIntosh, and Alison McQueen, Collecting in the Gilded Age: Art Patronage in Pittsburgh, 1890–1910 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997), 179–298. 18. Anne Barstow, “Review of Marina Warner, Joan of Arc: The Image of Female Heroism,” American Historical Review, 87 (April 1982), 437. Terry Castle, The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 118–20. 19. Edith Rockefeller McCormick to John D. Rockefeller Sr., 22 October 1915 and 24 January 1918, cited in Stasz, Rockefeller Women, 201. 20. Carl Jung, “Approaching the Unconscious,” in Man and His Symbols, ed. Jung (1964; repr., New York: Dell, 1969), 32. Harold McCormick had sought psychiatric treatment from Jung some years earlier, following the death of their son in 1901. 21. Marie-Louise von Franz, “The Process of Individuation,” in Man and His Symbols, ed. Jung, 195–96.

NOTES

•

281

22. Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, ed. Aniela Jaªé, trans. Richard and Clara Winston (New York: Pantheon, 1963), 160. 23. Ibid., 225. 24. Stasz, Rockefeller Women, 198–99. 25. On the Frank Lloyd Wright commission, see http://www.pbs.org/flw/buildings/taliesin/ taliesin_movements.html. See also Jean Shebs, “Edith Rockefeller McCormick’s Villa Turicum,” Chicago, November 1955, 28–32, and Will Leonard, “The Long, Silent Death of Villa Turicum,” Chicago Tribune, 14 August 1966. 26. Aniela Jaªé, “Symbolism in the Visual Arts,” in Man and His Symbols, ed. Jung, 265–66. 27. From the bylaws of the Psychological Club in Zurich; see Deidre Bair, Jung: A Biography (New York: Back Bay Books, 2003), 271. 28. McCormick, interview, “Burglars Ransack Home.” 29. See “Duveen Brothers Records, 1876–1981,” Special Collections and Visual Resources, Getty Research Institute for the History of Art and the Humanities, Brentwood, CA. 30. Mary Emery, cited in National Cyclopedia of American Biography, 62 vols. (New York: James T. White, 1893–1984), 24:127–28. See also Millard F. Rogers Jr., “Mary M. Emery: Development of an American Collector,” Cincinnati Art Museum Bulletin, 13 (1986), 4–19. On Mariemont, see Warren Wright Parks, The Mariemont Story (Cincinnati: Creative Writers, 1967); John Delafons, “Mariemont, Ohio—A New Community, 1923,” Town and Country Planning (January–February 1993), 27–29; and Millard F. Rogers Jr., Rich in Good Works: Mary M. Emery of Cincinnati (Akron, OH: University of Akron Press, 2001). 31. O‹ce of Messrs Rockefeller General Files, Rockefeller Family Papers, box 80, folder 609, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. See also “Announcing Edithton Beach Sponsored by Mrs. Edith Rockefeller McCormick,” Chicago Tribune, 16 September 1925, and Stasz, Rockefeller Women, 263–69. 32. “Mrs. McCormick in Real Estate,” New York Herald, 24 December 1923. 33. See “Millions Invested in Grandiose Real Estate Developments by Krenn & Dato,” Chicago Tribune, 27 August 1932. 34. See Kristie Miller, “Yesterday’s City: Of the Women, for the Women, and by the Women,” Chicago History, Summer 1995, 58–72. 35. See Stasz, Rockefeller Women, 170 and 221. 36. E. T. Hertz, Manager, Bond Department, Krenn & Dato to Mrs. McKinlock, 9 May 1925, Rockefeller Family Papers, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, box 81, folder 619, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. 37. Jolande Jacobi, cited in Bair, Jung, 270. 38. “Proposed National University Campus, Edithton Beach, Wisconsin,” O‹ce of Messrs Rockefeller General Files, Rockefeller Family Papers, box 81, folder 619, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC, 2–4. 39. “Mrs. E. Rockefeller M’Cormick Sacrifices to Aid ‘Little Fellow,’” United Press clipping, 21 July 1932, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Rockefeller Family Papers, box 81, folder 620, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC. See also Stasz, Rockefeller Women, 278. 40. McCormick to John D. Rockefeller Jr., 4 June 1932, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, Rockefeller Family Papers, box 80, folder 609, Rockefeller Foundation Archives, RAC.

282

•

NOTES

41. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Intimate Memories: European Experiences (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1933), 453. 42. Mabel Dodge Luhan, “Holiday from Science,” Southwest Review, Summer 1946, 223 and 222. 43. Mabel Dodge Luhan, Edge of Taos Desert: An Escape to Reality (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1936), 109–10. 44. Recollections of McNay’s lawyer William Moloney, cited in Lois Wood Burkhalter, Marion Koogler McNay: A Biography, 1883–1950 (San Antonio: Marion Koogler McNay Art Institute, 1968), 33. 45. Victor Higgins, 27 June 1939, cited in Taos Artists and Their Patrons, 1898–1950, ed. Suzan Campbell (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999), 150. 46. Dodge Luhan, “Holiday from Science,” 222. 47. Frederic Jameson, “Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism,” New Left Review, 146 (July–August 1984), 68. 48. Stamford Advocate, cited in Miller, “Yesterday’s City,” 71. 49. Robert B. Stepto, “‘Intimate Things in Place’: A Conversation with Toni Morrison,” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship, ed. Michael S. Harper and Robert B. Stepto (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 213. 50. Lydia Malbin, quoted in “Lydia Winston Malbin: A Futurist Eye,” Art News, 87 (April 1988), 91. 51. Marieluise Hessel, interview, “The Provocateur and His Well-Heeled Collaborator,” New York Times, 12 November 2006, Arts, 31. 52. See Karen Blair, The Torchbearers: Women and Their Amateur Arts Associations in America, 1890–1930 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994).

NOTES

•

283

Illustrations

PLATES ( following page 114)

1.

Childe Hassam, The Room of Flowers, 1894, oil on canvas, private collection.

2.

Attributed to Abraham Hosier (fl. 1856–77), Hall of the Morris-Jumel Mansion, mid– nineteenth century, watercolor, Museum of the City of New York, Gift of Mrs. Eliot Tuckerman, 48.125.7.

3.

Enrichetta Narducci, Mary Telfair, 1842, gouache on ivory, Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia, Bequest of Mary Telfair 1875.39.

4.

The Peach Bloom Vase, Chinese, c. 1710–22, porcelain, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore.

5.

Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Lady in Gold, c. 1912, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York, Contemporary Picture Purchase Fund, 15.322.

6.

Ignacio de Leon y Escosura, Samuel Putnam Avery in His Gallery, 1876, oil on canvas, S. P. Avery Collection, Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.

7.

Alexandre Cabanel, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1876, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Collection, Bequest of Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, 1887 (97.15.82). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

8.

Florence Lundborg, The Riches of California (detail), 1915, mural, California Building, Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco. Photo: San Francisco Arts Commission, Civic Art Collection.

285

9.

Alva Vanderbilt’s “Votes for Women” cup and saucer (reproduction), Newport Mansions Collection, The Preservation Society of Newport County, Newport, Rhode Island.

10.

Robert Henri, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, 1916, oil on canvas, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Gift of Flora Whitney Miller, 86.70.3.

1 1.

Gertrude Stein’s Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia (1912), bound in a Florentine wrapper and distributed by Mabel Dodge in 1913, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

12.

Tsugouharu Foujita, Emily Crane Chadbourne, 1922, tempera and silver leaf on canvas, The Art Institute of Chicago, Gift of Emily Crane Chadbourne, 1952.997. Art © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris.

FIGURES

1.

Music room, Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, Phoebe Apperson Hearst residence, Pleasanton, California, c. 1903–4. From Barr Ferree, American Estates and Gardens (New York: Munn and Company, 1904), 211.

8

Picture gallery, William H. Vanderbilt residence, New York, 1883. From Earl Shinn, Mr. Vanderbilt’s House and Collection (Boston: George Barrie, 1883–84), 2:x.

9

3.

“Collecting Mania,” Lippincott’s Magazine, 29 (January 1882), 112.

13

4.

James Abbott McNeill Whistler, Purple and Rose: The Lange Leizen of the Six Marks, 1864, oil on canvas, Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection, 1917.

15

Alcide Ercole, Eliza Bowen Jumel with Her Grandniece and Grandnephew, Eliza Jumel Chase and William Inglis Chase, 1854, oil on canvas, Morris-Jumel Mansion, New York.

20

Anthony Kimbel, “A Parlor View in a New York Dwelling House,” Gleason’s Pictorial Drawing-Room Companion, November 11, 1854, 300.

24

Morris-Jumel Mansion, 65 Jumel Terrace, New York. Photo: Historic House Trust of New York City/Madeleine Doering.

27

Sébastien Bourdon, Rebecca and Eleazar, c. 1664, oil on canvas, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Juliana Cheney Edwards Collection. Photograph © 2008 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

37

Frans Post, Rural Landscape in Brazil, 1664, oil on wood panel, Bequest of John Ringling, Collection of The John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art, the State Art Museum of Florida, Sarasota.

38

Picture gallery, Armsmear, Elizabeth Colt residence, Hartford, Connecticut, c. 1880. Photo: Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut.

41

Horatio Greenough, Medora, 1832, marble, Mayor and City Council of Baltimore, on extended loan to The Baltimore Museum of Art, R.11168.

43

2.

5.

6. 7. 8.

9.

10. 1 1.

286

•

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

12. 13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

22.

23.

24. 25.

26. 27.

Sketch of Mary Sexton Morgan and William Schaus, Philadelphia Times, February 21, 1886.

47

Portiere painted by Henrietta Caswell Smith after François Millet’s The Angelus, Henrietta and Charles Smith residence, New York, 1883. From Artistic Houses (New York: Appleton, 1883–84), part 2, facing p. 129.

52

Elliott Daingerfield, A Quaint Oriental Shop, 1885, oil on canvas, Collection of Morris and Wendy Evans.

53

Earl Shinn [Edward Strahan], n.d. From Josia H. Shinn, The History of the Shinn Family in Europe and America (Washington, DC: Genealogical and Historical Publishing Company, 1903), facing p. 48.

54

Ticket to “Ladies’ Private View” (front) presented by Samuel Putnam Avery at Leavitt Art Rooms, New York, 1877, Collection of The New-York Historical Society, negative 72694S.

59

Ticket to “Ladies’ Private View” (back) presented by Samuel Putnam Avery at Leavitt Art Rooms, New York, 1877, Collection of The New-York Historical Society, negative 72695S.

59

James Sabin, “The Leavitt Art Rooms, 817 Broadway, New York,” c. 1882–83, The New-York Historical Society, New York, negative 70960.

60

American Art Association gallery, New York, illustrated in Harper’s Weekly, November 15, 1884, 750. Photo: HarpWeek LLC.

60

Alexandre Cabanel, The Shulamite, 1876, oil on canvas. From Earl Shinn, The Art Treasures of America (Philadelphia: Gebbie and Barrie, 1879–82), 1:120.

66

Peabody and Stearns (architects), Vinland, Catharine Lorillard Wolfe residence, Newport, Rhode Island, 1884. From George Sheldon, Artistic Country-Seats (1886–87; repr., New York: Da Capo Press, 1979), 2:185.

68

Edward Burne-Jones for William Morris and Company, The Viking Ship, 1884, stained-glass window for Vinland, Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, Delaware.

70

Modern and old master picture galleries, William Henry and Anna Breck Aspinwall residence, New York, illustrated in Harper’s Weekly, February 26, 1859, 133. Photo: HarpWeek LLC.

75

Edward Steichen, Charles Lang Freer, c. 1915–16, platinum print, George Eastman House, Rochester, New York. Reprinted with permission of Joanna T. Steichen.

77

Eastman Johnson, Christmas Time: The Blodgett Family, 1864, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Gift of Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Whitney Blodgett, 1983 (1983.486). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

79

Drawing room, Alexander and Cornelia Stewart residence, New York, c. 1883. From Artistic Houses (New York: Appleton, 1883–84), part 1, facing p. 14.

82

Picture gallery, Alexander and Cornelia Stewart residence, New York, c. 1883. From Artistic Houses (New York: Appleton, 1883–84), part 1, facing p. 15.

82

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

•

287

28.

Isabella Stewart Gardner residence, 152 Beacon Street, Boston, 1900. Photo: Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

88

John Singer Sargent, Isabella Stewart Gardner, 1887–88, oil on canvas, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

90

30.

Titian room, Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, Boston.

91

31.

Phoebe Hearst at the San Francisco Preparedness Parade, July 22, 1916. From the San Francisco Examiner, July 23, 1916. Photo: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

94

Charles Grafly’s sculpture The Pioneer Mother, installed at the Palace of Fine Arts during the Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. From Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (New York: Putnam’s, 1921), 3:74.

95

29.

32.

33.

Art gallery and music room, Jane and Leland Stanford residence, San Francisco, photographed by Eadweard Muybridge, 1877. Photo: Stanford University Archives, PC6, box 5, pl. 31. 99

34.

Art gallery, Woodward’s Gardens, San Francisco, 1876. Photo: San Francisco History Center, San Francisco Public Library.

101

Salon, Phoebe and George Hearst residence, Washington, DC, photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1899. Photo: Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-49937.

105

Drawing room, Phoebe and George Hearst residence, Washington, DC, photographed by Frances Benjamin Johnston, 1899. Photo: Frances Benjamin Johnston Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62-56994.

106

Art gallery and ballroom, The Castle, Bertha and Potter Palmer residence, Chicago, c. 1900. Photo: Chicago History Museum ICHi-01266.

111

Phoebe Hearst (in Chinese robe) with YWCA convention attendees, Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, Pleasanton, California, 1913. Photo: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

113

Library, Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, Pleasanton, California. From Barr Ferree, American Estates and Gardens (New York: Munn and Company, 1904), 214.

114

Bernard Maybeck (architect), Hearst Hall, Berkeley, California, 1899. Photo: The Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

117

Guillaume Dumée, Laurent Guyot, and Henry Lerambert, The Gifts, from The Story of Queen Artemisia, c. 1611–22, tapestry, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, The Ethel Morrison Van Derlip Fund.

117

35.

36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

42.

Tapestry gallery for exhibition Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst Loan Collection, Palace of Fine Arts, San Francisco, 1916. From Catalogue, Mrs. Phoebe A. Hearst Loan Collection, ed. J. Nilsen Laurvik (San Francisco: San Francisco Art Association, 1917), facing p. 65. 119

288

•

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

43.

“Panama Pankaline Imogene Equalrights” at the Panama Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco, 1915. From Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (New York: Putnam’s, 1921), 2:350.

122

Julia Morgan (architect), interior of the YWCA Building, Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915. Copyright: YWCA of the USA. Photo: Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

123

California Building, Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915. From Frank Morton Todd, The Story of the Exposition (New York: Putnam’s, 1921), 3:54.

125

Foyer and reception room, California Building, Panama Pacific International Exposition, 1915. From Anna Pratt Simpson, Problems Women Solved: Being the Story of the Woman’s Board of the Panama-Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco: Woman’s Board, 1915), 187.

126

47.

Louisine Havemeyer’s “Ship of State,” Scribner’s Magazine, 71 (May 1922), 538.

129

48.

Louisine Havemeyer passing the “Torch of Liberty,” 1915, Scribner’s Magazine, 71 (May 1922), 537.

130

Chinese teahouse at Marble House, Alva Vanderbilt residence, Newport, Rhode Island. Photo: The Preservation Society of Newport County, Newport, Rhode Island.

132

Adelaide Johnson, Portrait Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, 1921, Rotunda of United States Capitol, Washington, DC. Photo: Architect of the Capitol.

133

Miguel Covarrubias, “A Salon Recital of Modern Music: One of Those Awesomely Elegant Evenings Which Society Has to Suªer,” Vanity Fair, 31 (February 1929), 54.

136

Title page of Eleanor Hewitt’s The Making of a Modern Museum (New York: Wednesday Afternoon Club, 1919; 3rd ed., New York: Cooper Union Museum for the Arts of Decoration, 1941).

140

Students at the Cooper Union referring to volumes in the Decloux Collection, 1910. Photo: Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, Smithsonian Institution, New York.

141

Agnes Ernst Meyer and Marius de Zayas, Mental Reactions, 1915, collage, reproduced in 291, April 1915.

143

Library, The Haven, Katherine Dreier residence, West Redding, Connecticut, 1936, with Marcel Duchamp’s Tu m’ (1918) and The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even (1915–23). Photo: Katherine Dreier Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

146

International Exhibition of Modern Art, organized by the Société Anonyme, Brooklyn Museum, New York, 1926. Photo: Katherine Dreier Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

147

44.

45. 46.

49.

50.

51.

52.

53.

54. 55.

56.

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

•

289

57.

58. 59.

Study, Louise and Walter Arensberg residence, Hollywood, California, photographed by Fred R. Dapprich, c. 1945. Photo: Philadelphia Museum of Art, Louise and Walter Arensberg Archives.

150

Second-floor drawing room, Abigail and John Rockefeller Jr. residence, New York, n.d. Photo: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

154

Print room, Top-side Gallery, Abigail and John Rockefeller Jr. residence, New York, 1929–31. Photo: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

154

60. Large gallery, Top-side Gallery, Abigail and John Rockefeller Jr. residence, New York, 1929–31. Photo: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, opening exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, November 7–December 7, 1929. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

160

View of entryway, from Mary J. Quinn [Sullivan], Planning and Furnishing the Home (New York: Harper, 1914), facing p. 128.

161

Living room, Lillie Bliss residence, New York, c. 1931. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

162

Gallery, Lillie Bliss residence, New York, c. 1931. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

163

Willi Baumeister, Wie Wohnen? Die Wohnung: Werkbund Ausstellung (How to Live? The Dwelling: Werkbund Exhibition), 1927, color lithograph, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Gift of Philip Johnson. © 2008 Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/VG Bild Kunst, Bonn. Digital Image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA/Art Resource, New York.

165

66. The Museum of Non-Objective Painting, New York, 1939. Photo: Courtesy of The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum Archives, New York. 67.

155

169

Installation view, Spring Exhibition—Flowers in Art, Whitney Studio Galleries, New York, March 17–29, 1930. Left to right: Henri Burkhard, Field and Garden Flowers; Niles Spencer, Bedside Table; Max Kuehne, White Roses; Henry Billings, Garden Tools. Lower left: sculpture by William Zorach. Photo: Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, Library Archives; photographer: Soichi Sunami.

173

Leo Stein in his studio, 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, c. 1905. Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

180

69. Gertrude Stein’s study, 27 rue de Fleurus, Paris, 1914–15. Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

182

68.

70.

71.

Pablo Picasso, Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 1906, oil on canvas, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Bequest of Gertrude Stein, 1946 (47.106). © 2008 Estate of Pablo Picasso/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York. Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Gertrude Stein seated before her portrait by Pablo Picasso, photographed by

290

•

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

182

72.

73.

74.

75.

76.

77.

78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83.

84. 85. 86.

Man Ray in 1922. © 2008 Man Ray Trust/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris. Photo: Telimage, Paris.

183

Salon, Villa Curonia, Mabel and Edwin Dodge residence, Florence, c. 1905–15. Photo: Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

186

Mabel Dodge at Villa Curonia, 1911. Photo: Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

188

Salon, Mabel Dodge residence, New York, 1916. Photo: Mabel Dodge Luhan Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

190

Ellen La Motte with her black cockatoo, from an unidentified newspaper clipping, dated January 17, 1928. Photo: Library of Congress, Washington, DC, Prints and Photographs Division, LC-USZ62–118188.

195

Gertrude Stein, Etta Cone, and Claribel Cone, July 1903. Photo: Gertrude Stein Papers, Yale Collection of American Literature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

198

Claribel Cone residence, Baltimore, n.d., with Henri Matisse’s The Blue Nude (1907). Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

201

Foyer, Claribel Cone residence, Baltimore, n.d. Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

202

Etta Cone residence, Baltimore, 1906, with Pablo Picasso’s La Coiªure (1906). Photo: Dr. Claribel Cone and Miss Etta Cone Papers, Baltimore Museum of Art.

203

Friedrich August Kaulbach, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, 1908, oil on canvas, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

208

Edith Rockefeller McCormick residence, Chicago, n.d. Photo: Chicago History Museum ICHi-01241.

211

Marie Antoinette room, Edith Rockefeller McCormick residence, Chicago, n.d. Photo: Chicago History Museum ICHi-51020.

212

Interior courtyard, Villa Turicum, Edith Rockefeller McCormick residence, Lake Forest, Illinois, 1933. Photo: Chicago History Museum, ICHi-51021; photographed by Frederick O. Bemm.

214

May festival, Mariemont, Ohio, 1930. Photo: Cincinnati Museum Center— Cincinnati Historical Society; photographed by Warren Wright Parks.

216

Proposed National University Campus, Edithton Beach, Wisconsin. Photo: Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow, New York.

217

Louise Bourgeois, Femme Maison, c. 1945–47, oil and ink on linen, Collection of Agnes Gund, New York. Photo: Eeva Inkeri; courtesy Cheim & Read, New York.

221

I L L U S T R AT I O N S

•

291

Index

Page numbers in italics refer to illustrations. 29, 33–34, 36, 54, 236n80, 236n83; exhibition of Jumel’s collection at, 17, 21–23, 29, 30, 33–35, 237n88

Abshoven, Theodor van, Tabagia, 30 Abstract Expressionism, 204 Ackerman, Phyllis, 118–19, 259n93; Survey of Persian Art, 118 activism and art, 18, 93, 96, 97, 103, 110, 128–31,

American art, 39, 78, 159, 161, 204; decorative, 104–5; see also specific artists and collectors American Art Association Galleries, 48, 50, 59, 60 American Institute for Persian Art and Archaeology (New York), 118 American Institute of Architects, 131

135, 146, 192, 193, 218, 220 Adams, Abigail, 17, 23 Adams, John, 7, 25 Addams, Jane, 124, 148; The Long Road of Woman’s Memory, 148–49 Adler, Blanche, 204 Aesthetic movement, 10, 16–17, 54, 68, 69, 74, 109, 206 aesthetic philosophy, 69; Kantian, 43, 52, 54; of Leo Stein, 179 African Americans, 64 African art, 159, 197 Agassiz, Elizabeth Cary, 87 Ahwanee Hotel (Yosemite), 259n93 AIDS activists, 220 Albert, Prince, 74 Allston, Washington, Elijah in the Desert, 86

Americanists, 22, 35 American Monthly Magazine, 34 American Museum of Natural History (New York), 64 American Renaissance, 109 American Women’s Association, 149 androgyny, 149–50, 170 Anglesey, Marquess of, 72 Anthony, Susan B., 85, 93–94, 108, 121, 132, 133, 133, 143 Apaches, 218 Archipenko, Alexander, 147 Arensberg, Louise, 150 Arensberg, Walter, 146, 150, 150–51, 171

Allyn, Timothy, 238n100 American Academy of Fine Arts (New York), 17,

293

Armitage, Susan, 259n99 Armory Show (New York, 1913), 137, 147, 149, 151, 171, 200; Dodge and, 178, 185, 192; female patrons of, 156–60; historical and categorical groupings in, 149 Arp, Hans, 168 Arsdel, Eva van, 12 Art Amateur, 49, 56, 58 Art Deco, 155 Artemisia, Queen, 116, 117 Art Institute of Chicago, 151, 194, 196, 197, 278n92; Antiquarian Society, 196 Art Journal, 46, 53 Art of War: Recounter, The (tapestry), 105 Arts and Crafts movement, 10, 16–17, 54, 68, 74, 109, 206 Arts magazine, 172 Art Society of Hartford, 40 Art Workers Club for Women (New York), 157 Asia Institute (New York), 119 Asian decorative arts, 16, 45, 47–48, 59, 76, 81, 87, 113, 197; see also Chinese decorative arts; Japanese decorative arts “as-ifness,” 49 Aspinwall, Anna Breck, 73–74, 75, 244n69, 245n72 Aspinwall, William Henry, 73–74, 75 Associated Artists, 69 Association of Artists and Sculptors, 192 Astor, Augusta, 54, 62, 64 Astor, John Jacob, 54 Atherton, Gertrude, 95–96, 100 Atlantic Monthly, 135 Avery, Samuel Putnam, 11, 58–61, 244n59, 244n61, plate 6; and decorative arts, 58– 59; “Ladies’ Private View” sponsored by, 58–59, 59

Barnes, Djuna, Nightwood, 212 Barnes, Earl, 135 Baron, Stanislas, 265n34 Barr, Alfred, Jr., 160–61, 164–69, 171, 181 Barstow, Anne, 212 Batterson, James, 238n98 Baudelaire, Charles, 52 Baudrillard, Jean, 12, 49 Bauer, Rudolf, 168 Bauhaus, 147 Baumeister, Willi, 165; Wie Wohnen?, 165, 165–66 Beard, George Miller, 268n71; Practical Treatise on Nervous Exhaustion, 76 Beauharnais, Josephine de, 31, 32, 207 Beaux Arts style, 123 Beecher, Catherine, 23; The American Woman’s Home, 57, 210 Belk, Russell, 22, 242n37 Belmont, Alva Smith Vanderbilt. See Vanderbilt, Alva Smith Belmont, August, 40 Belmont, Caroline, 62–63 Belmont, Oliver, 131 Benisovich, Michel, 234n56 Benjamin, Jessica, 74, 187 Benjamin, Walter, 91, 114 Benstock, Shari, 247n107 Berenson, Bernard, 89, 179, 254n27, 278n99 Berenson, Mary, 71 Berlin, Ellin, 102, 255n32 Berlin, Irving, 255n32 Bernadotte, Jean-Baptiste, 32 Berry, Duchesse de, 17, 31, 235n60, 235n61 Bertrand, General, 236n72 Bierstadt, Albert, 40 Billings, Henry, Garden Tools, 173 Birth Control Clinic (New York), 157 Bismarck, Mona Williams, 3

Bachelard, Pierre, The Poetics of Space, 62 Bacon, Francis, 105 Badia collection, 265n34 Ballets Russes, 187 Baltimore Museum of Art, 197, 204, 205, 279n116 Baltzell, E. Digby, 83 Barberini Collection, 105 Barbizon School, 55, 105, 110, 240n11 Barnard College, 143

Blair, Karen, 44, 171 Blanc, Theresa (Theresa Bentzon), 177; The Condition of Woman in the United States, 87 Blanchfield, Karen, 40 Blatch, Harriot Stanton, 129 Blavatsky, Madame, 267n58 Bliss, Elizabeth, 157 Bliss, Lillie, 135, 157–59, 162, 163, 162–63, 167,

294

•

INDEX

172, 192, 269n87; and Museum of Modern Art, 137, 157, 158, 159 Bliss, Mildred, 142, 207, 280n3 Bliss, Robert, 207 Blodgett, Abigail Wheatley, 78, 79, 80, 244n69, 245n72, 249n122 Blodgett, Eleanor, 78, 142 Blodgett, Mary Elizabeth, 78 Blodgett, William, 78, 86 Bloomsbury group, 194 Blumenthal, George, 265n32 Boas, George, 200 Bonaparte, Hortense, 31 Bonaparte, Joseph, 32 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 29, 31–33, 211, 236n72 Bonapartists, 31–33 Bonfils, Winifred Black, 118 Bonheur, Rosa, 73; The Horse Fair, 249n130 Borden, Mary, 195 Borie, Adolph, 83 Borie, Elizabeth McKean, 83, 85–86, 244n69, 250n144 Boston Equal Suffrage Association for Good Government, 87 Boston Museum of Fine Arts, 36–37, 86, 87, 205n146, 277n76 Boudin, Eugène, 86 Bouguereau, William-Adolphe, 55, 81 Bourbon family, 31 Bourdon, Sébastien, 36; Christ and the Woman of Samaria, 37; Rebecca and Eleazer, 36, 37 Bourgeois, Louise, 220; Femme Maison, 220, 221 Bowdoin, James, 22 Bowen, Betsey. See Jumel, Eliza Bowen Bowen, George Washington, 25

Brooks, Peter, 231n3 Brown, Bill, 8, 87, 89, 179 Brown, Gillian, 12, 174 Brueghel, Jan, 35, 36 Bryant, Harriet, 262n1 Burbank, Luther, 115 Burkhard, Henri, Field and Garden Flowers, 173 Burne-Jones, Edward: The Viking Ship, 69, 70 Burns, Sarah, 230n62 Burr, Aaron, 17, 21, 27–29, 33 Bushman, Richard, 7 Butler, Judith, 189 Byzantine art, 207 Cabanel, Alexandre, 55, 61, 65, 98; Catharine Lorillard Wolfe, plate 7; Death of Francesca di Rimini, 245n72; The Shulamite, 66, 67, 246n84 California Art Gallery, 97 California Mission style, 112, 124 Calvert, Rosalie Stier, 35 Camille, Michael, 43, 187–88 capitalism: economic oppression of women under, 11, 190; growth of, domestic ideology and, 29; laissez-faire, 11, 78, 210; refinement and, 7; see also consumption; possessive individualism Carnegie, Andrew, 116 Carpenter, Edward, 190 Caryl, Eliza Chase Jumel Péry, 233n43 Cassatt, Mary, 129; Modern Woman, 127; and suffrage, 129 Castle, Terry, 212–13 Catharine Lorillard Wolfe Art Club, 64 Cathedral of the Incarnation (Garden City), 80

Boys and Girls Aid Society, 99 Brancusi, Constantin, 147, 150 Braque, Georges, 159

Catherine the Great, Tsarina of Russia, 109, 207 Catholicism, 27 Catlin, George, 85 Centennial International Exhibition (Philadelphia, 1876), 11, 40, 83–84, 87, 92, 102, 120; Memorial Hall, 84, 85, 103, 250n141; Woman’s Pavilion, 84–85, 103, 107, 128;

Breeskin, Adelyn, 204 Breton, Jules, The Communicants, 61 Brett, John Watkins, 230n3

Women’s Executive Committee, 249n137 Central Pacific Railroad, 97 Century Club, 103, 116

bric-a-brac, 16, 52–54, 63, 71, 162, 242n37 Brimmer, Martin, 86 Brooklyn Museum, 147, 147–48

Cézanne, Hortense, 181 Cézanne, Paul, 158, 159, 160, 161, 181–82, 194,

Bowen, John, 25 Bowen, Mary, 28 Boym, Svetlana, The Future of Nostalgia, 206

197

INDEX

•

295

Chadbourne, Emily Crane, 19, 177–78, 179, 193– 97, 277n77, 278n92, plate 12; playfulness of, 196–97; subjectivity of, 195 Chagall, Marc, 168 Chaplin, Charles, Haydee, 65 Chase, William Merritt, 11, 49 Chasin, Laura, 152 Chavanne, Jean, 30 Cheney, Ednah Dow, 57 Chicago Civic Federation, 110 Chicago Woman’s Club, 1 Chinese decorative arts, 16, 144, 153; Peach Bloom Vase, 47–48, 50, 53, plate 4; see also Asian decorative arts Chinese immigrants, 97 Christian art, early, 207 Christian Union, 107 Church, Frederic, 40 City Art Gallery (Manchester), 84 civic maternalism, 108, 121, 143, 146, 171; “playhousekeeping” of, 148, 149 Civil War, 10, 17, 38, 39, 42, 44, 55–56, 86, 177 Clark, Kenneth, 159 Clark, Stephen, 160 Clary, Desirée, 32 Clary, Julie, 32 Clews, Henry, 190, 265n34 Clews, Marie, 190–91 Clifford, James, 21 Clinton, DeWitt, 33 Club Life, 112 clubwomen, 1, 18; and abstract art, 171; in Boston, 86–87; Hearst and, 18, 93, 94, 96, 103,

identity, 10, 11, 12, 16, 19, 21, 38, 39, 61– 62, 131, 140, 166, 177, 195, 200–202, 209; and individuation, 3, 11, 26, 48, 62, 71, 92, 213; and intersubjectivity, 74, 151; male vs. female, 4–5, 6, 9–12, 13, 16, 22–23, 41, 179–81; motivations for, 2, 7–8, 12, 14, 74, 77, 114, 156, 179–80, 201, 205; as play, 14–17, 49, 50–51, 52, 62, 113, 131, 149, 153, 155–56, 189, 196–97; and psychic release, 3, 69, 76, 112, 138–39, 152, 185–88, 191, 201–2, 213; subjectivity in, 5, 41, 56, 65, 71, 195; use value in, 7, 8, 12–18, 113–14, 140, 166, 201 Collector, The, 73, 85, 256n47 Colman, Samuel, 68–69 Colonial Williamsburg, 207 Colt, Elizabeth Hart Jarvis, 17, 39–42, 73, 237n93, 238n98; Armsmear, 41; identity expressed in collecting of, 17, 39, 40 Colt, Samuel, 39, 237n96 Colton, Ellen White, 244n69, 253n12 Columbian Gallery (New York), 22 Columbia University, 191 comfort, 7; art objects as, 10, 16, 48, 49, 89, 111, 118, 136–37, 166, 200, 220 (see also transitional objects) commodity culture, 8, 11, 71, 83; and fetishism, 166 Cone, Claribel, 9, 19, 177, 178, 197–202, 198, 201, 202, 204–5; symbiotic relation to collection, 200–202 Cone, Edward, 199 Cone, Etta, 19, 177, 178, 184, 197–200, 198, 202, 203, 204–5, 278n99, 279n116; sexuality of, 198, 202, 204 Cone, Laura Weil, 279n116 Conference of Great Women (Newport, 1914), 131 Congress, U.S., 93, 96, 107, 121

104, 105, 111, 112, 116, 120; Palmer and, 18, 108; and political activism, 94, 103, 104, 116, 120 Clunas, Craig, 16 Codman, Charles Russell, 230n3 Codman, Ogden, 246n94, 265n34 Codman, Richard, 246n94 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 48

Congressional Union for Women Suffrage, 121, 128 connoisseurship, 16, 25, 36, 49, 54, 55, 140, 150, 156, 181, 194, 219 Constable, John, 250n141 Constable, W. G., 22, 230n3

Coles, Elizabeth, 64, 256n45 collecting: defined, 6–7, 15–17, 21; as domestic decoration, 23, 83; and desire, 43, 67, 74, 77, 187–88; and embodiment, 6, 43, 71, 87–89, 91, 151, 179, 187; as empowerment, 1, 3, 11, 22, 71, 83, 218, 220; and fantasy, 48–51, 62, 69, 73, 76, 89, 112, 187; and

296

Constant, Jean-Joseph Benjamin, On the Terrace, 81 Constitution, U.S. See Nineteenth Amendment

•

INDEX

Constructivism, 147 consumption, 45, 177; antebellum, 7; aristocratic tradition of, 207, 210, 211–12; conspicuous, 62, 110, 171, 177–78; department stores and, 81, 83; as empowerment for women, 11–12, 57, 65, 71–73, 83, 92; “frivolous,” by women, 3–4, 7, 12; gender conflict around, 78; McCormick on, 209, 210; and suffrage campaign, 129 Cook, Clarence, The House Beautiful, 51–52 Cooke, Maud, 7–8 Cooper, George Campbell, 265n34 Cooper, Peter, 142, 265n33 Cooper, Sarah, 108 Cooper-Hewitt Museum (New York). See Museum for the Arts of Decoration Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art, 134, 142, 158, 265n33, 278n92; Decloux Collection, 141 Coptic textiles, 197 Corcoran, William Wilson, 56, 67

Dada, 139, 144, 147, 167, 168 Daingerfield, Elliott, A Quaint Oriental Shop, 53, 53 Dale, Charles, 151 Dale, Chester, 160 Dale, Maud, 134, 151, 168 Dalí, Salvador, 150, 197 Dalton School, 159 Damrosch, Walter, 263n6 Dana, Charles, 47–48 Danet, Brenda, 113, 155–56 Dartmouth College, 137–38 Dato, Edward, 215 Davidge, Clara, 262n1 Davidson, Jo, 187 Davies, Arthur B., 156–58, 163 daydreaming. See fantasy dealers, 30–31, 46–47, 58–61, 74, 98, 207; women, 262n1; see also specific dealers Declaration of Rights for Women, 85 decorative arts, 10–11, 51–54, 64, 67–70, 88–

Corn, Wanda, xi, 100 Corning Museum of Glass, 278n92

90, 103–6, 109, 113, 118, 178–79, 193–94, 196, 211; Asian (see Asian decorative arts; Chinese decorative arts; Japanese decora-

Corot, Jean-Baptiste-Camille, 55, 113 Correggio, Antonio da, 36 Cosway, Maria, 30, 234n49 Coulevain, Pierre de, 178 Covarrubias, Miguel, “A Salon Recital of Modern Music,” 136 coverture, 28–29, 46 Crane, Josephine Boardman, 159, 162, 167 Crane, Richard, 196 Crane, Walter, 10–11 Crane, Winthrop Murray, 159 Craven, Wayne, 25 Croce, Benedetto, 273n1

tive arts); at Centennial International Exhibition, 84; dealers and, 58–59; defense of, 92, 118–19; fine art compared with, 6, 9, 50, 40, 52, 54–56, 63, 69, 89, 91, 180– 81, 195, 200–202; as income source for women, 103–4, 118, 141, 142; machine design vs., 164–67; male collectors and, 10–11, 74, 76–77, 138–39, 153, 177, 179–81; and modernism, 136–37, 140–42, 162–67; see also bric-a-brac; Museum for the Arts of Decoration

Crocker, Anna, 137 Crocker, Charles, 97, 98 Crocker, Mary Ann Deming, 97–100, 244n69,

Degas, Edgar, 129, 158, 181 de Kay, Charles, 48 Delacroix, Eugène, 86 Delaunay, Robert, 150

253n12 Crowninshield, Frank, 153, 159, 161 Csikszentmihalyi, Mikhail, The Meaning of Things, 50–51 Cubières, Marquise de, 31 Cubism, 139, 147, 181, 199

Demuth, Charles, 207 Dennison, Isabella Richardson, 244n69, 250n12 Denon, Dominique Vivant, 33 Deri, Susan, 156 Desgoffe, Blaise-Alexandre, 63

cult of true womanhood, 21, 26, 38, 44, 46, 84; New Woman vs., 121, 175 Cushing, Sarah, 105, 256n45

Deskey, Donald, 155 Desobry, Benjamin, 26 Deutscher Werkbund, 165

INDEX

•

297

Dewing, Thomas Wilmer, 76; Lady in Gold, 49, plate 5 de Wolfe, Elsie, 142, 164; The House in Good Taste, 164 de Young, Katherine, 102, 255n31 Dickens, Charles, 78 Dinesen, Isak, 159 Dissanayke, Ellen, 112 Dodge, Anna Thomson, 211 Dodge, Edwin, 185, 189; Villa Curonia, 185, 186 Dodge, Grace, 157 Dodge, Mabel, 4, 15–16, 19, 135, 185–93, 190, 275n40, 276n70; and Armory Show, 157, 178, 185, 192; and decorative arts, 178, 185–86; in New Mexico, 185, 207, 218– 19; psychic release through collecting, 185–89, 191; Stein and, 177, 178, 185, 186, 189, 192, 193; Villa Curonia, 14, 185–89, 186, 188 Dolan, Tim, 54 domesticity, 7, 23, 44, 84, 108–9, 136–37, 189; modernism vs. 136–37, 164–67; New Women and, 121–22; in Stein residence, 179, 180; and women’s collections, 35, 38–39, 92, 135, 170, 207; and women’s voluntary organizations, 104 domestic space, 1, 23, 62, 71, 74, 76, 92, 96, 97, 108, 179; exhibitions and, 10, 35, 36, 39, 50, 59, 89, 91, 142, 147; as expression of identity, 12, 63, 71, 164, 213, 220; and public realm, 18, 29, 44, 76, 92, 96, 97, 100, 104, 109, 122, 131, 142, 170, 172–74, 177; in Whitney Museum, 172–74; see also home Draper, Dorothy, 173

Duveen, Joseph, 109, 207, 215, 254n27 Duveneck, Frank, 86 Eakins, Thomas, 161 Eastlake, Charles Locke, Hints on Household Taste, 53 École des Beaux-Arts, 55 Eddy, Arthur Jerome, 151 Edwards, Juliana Cheney, 37 El Greco, 129 Eliot, T. S., 159 elitism/elites, 4, 33–35, 109, 128, 135, 137, 193, 209, 225n11 Ellis, Havelock, 19, 177, 190 Emery, Mary Hopkins, 207, 209, 215 England: art collecting in, 10; bric-a-brac in, 53; merchants and manufacturers in, 84; modernism in, 137; Royal Academy, 33 Enlightenment, 56 Ercole, Alcide, Eliza Bowen Jumel with Her Grandniece and Grandnephew, Eliza Jumel Chase and William Inglis Chase, 20 Eugénie, Empress, 259n90 Evans, Karl, 185 Exposition Universelle (Paris, 1867), 58 fantasy, 46, 48–49, 67, 91, 124, 131, 177, 204; acting out of, 112, 187, 189; as aspect of collecting, 48–51, 62, 69, 73, 76, 89, 112, 187; in expansion of gender roles, 63; in Jungian analysis, 213; of “what-ifness,” 178 Fantin-Latour, Henri, 86 Farrand, Beatrix Jones, 207 Fauvism, 199, 200 Fell, Amanda Ruckman, 83, 85–86, 244n69

Dreier, Katherine, 18, 134, 146–50, 158, 170, 171, 174, 267n58; The Haven, 146; and link of art and everyday, 147–48, 149, 158

Fell, Joseph Gillingham, 83 Felski, Rita, 139, 207 femininity: masculinity vs., 110, 138, 149–50; normative definitions of, 22, 41, 72, 73, 83, 100, 107, 142, 197, 207; see also cult of true womanhood; gendering feminism, 84–85, 97, 127, 139, 142, 159, 171;

Dreier, Mary, 148 Duchamp, Marcel, 146–47, 149, 150, 171; The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors, Even, 146, 147; Nude Descending a Staircase, 137; Rrose Sélavy, 146; Tu m’, 146, 147 Dufy, Raoul, 279n116 Dughet, Gaspard, 30 Dumée, Guillaume, The Gifts, 117 Durand-Ruel Gallery (Paris), 151

backlash against, 137–39, 143, 174, 207; civic maternalism and, 146; domestic, 122; moderate, 104, 108; museums as laboratories for, 50; rhetoric of, 121; see also women’s suffrage Feminist Alliance, 171

Dutch painting, 30

298

•

INDEX

feminization of culture, 16, 96, 133, 135 Fénéon, Felix, 168 Fesch, Joseph Cardinal, 29–30, 33, 234n39

Gebbie and Barrie publishers, 58, 84 gendering: of culture, 106, 141, 144, 146, 174, 191, 205 (see also feminization of culture);

Few, Mary, 42–44 Ffoulke, Charles, 105, 194, 256n45 Field, Sara Bard, 262n133 First Exhibition of the Arts of Woman (Paris, 1892), 106 Fisher, George, 103 Flemish painting, 30, 159 flow, 71 Force, Juliana, 172, 174 forgeries, 36, 37 Foucault, Michel, 120 Foujita, Tsugouharu, 194–95; Emily Crane

and cultural space, 18; defined, 4–5, 146; and department stores’ space, 81, 83; elasticity in, 185, 191; and geography, 57, 177; of modernism, 149–52, 169–71, 172–74; and museums, 134, 135, 138, 147–48, 168, 169–70; see also femininity; masculinity; taste, sexing of General Federation of Women’s Clubs, 111 Georgia Historical Society, 39 German Home for Recreation for Women and Children (New York), 146 German painting, 51 Gérôme, Jean-Léon, 55, 81, 98 Getty Provenance Index, 36, 37 Gidea, Margaret, 193

Chadbourne, plate 12 Francophilia, 21, 22, 24, 31, 33–35, 197 Franklin, Benjamin, 7 Fraser, James Earl, 171 Freer, Charles Lang, 16, 76, 77, 77, 138 French art: decorative, 106, 113; painting, 30, 45, 51, 55, 61, 85–87, 98, 159, 161, 179; see also specific artists French Hospital of New York, 151 French Institute, 134; Museum of French Art, 151 Freud, Sigmund, 12, 48, 50, 65, 213; “Family Romances,” 212 Frick, Henry, 109 Fried, Rose, 262n1 Froebel, Friedrich Wilhelm August, 87, 104 Fry, Roger, 158, 178, 194 Fry, Sherry E., 260n102 Fuller, Margaret, 133 Fulton, Robert, 22–23, 231n15 Futurism, 139, 147, 274n20 Gage, Matilda, 85 Gainsborough, Thomas, 250n141 Ganson, Charles, 185 Ganson, Sara, 185 Gardner, Isabella Stewart, 87, 89, 90, 91, 113, 135, 194, 256n45, 277n77; Fenway Court, 88, 89, 91, 134, 142; symbiosis with collection, 87, 89, 91 Garrett, Alice Warder, 3 Gauguin, Paul, 160, 161, 181, 194, 197 gaze, 16, 42; female, 65; male, 144; patriarchal, 78

INDEX

Gilded Age: consumption in, 12, 95; coverture in, 46; domesticity in, 5; female agency in, 61, 65, 77; women collectors in, 17–18, 23, 40, 44, 45–92, 112, 155, 179, 189, 192 Gillespie, Elizabeth Duane, 249n137 Gillmore, Inez Haynes, 125 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, The Yellow Wallpaper, 210 Gilmor, Robert, 22, 43 Glessner, Frances, 196 Gobelin tapestries, 64, 118, 125 Gogh, Vincent van, 159, 160, 161 Golden Gate Kindergarten Association, 108 Goncourt, Edmond de, 16 Goodyear, A. Conger, 157, 159, 166, 167 Gore, Rebecca, 17 Gothic painting, 168 Goupil, Adolphe, 97 Goya, Francisco, 129 Grafly, Charles, The Pioneer Mother, 94, 95 Graham, John, 279n116 Grant, Ida Honoré, 110 Great Depression, 2, 4, 209, 218 Greenough, Horatio, Medora, 43, 43 Greenwich Village, 171, 189, 190, 191 Groff, Frances, 121, 123–24 Guercino, Incredulity of St. Thomas, 37 Guerrilla Girls, 220 Guggenheim, Irene Rothschild, 168–70, 271n123 Guggenheim, Peggy, 2, 170, 262n1

•

299

Guggenheim, Solomon, 168, 169, 174, 271n123 Guggenheim, Solomon R., Museum (New York), 1, 134, 168; see also Museum of NonObjective Painting Guyot, Laurent, The Gifts, 117

Hearst Castle (San Simeon), 101, 105, 115 Hearst Domestic Industries, 118 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 54 Henner, Jean-Jacques, Magdalen, 67 Henri, Robert, 171, 172; Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, plate 10 Herter Looms, 125 Hessel, Marieluise, 220 Heterodoxy Club, 190, 191 Hewitt, Eleanor, 18, 134, 139–43, 161, 172, 174, 265n34; The Making of a Modern Museum, 139–40, 140 Hewitt, Nancy, 4, 100 Hewitt, Sarah, 18, 134, 139, 141–43, 161, 172, 174, 265n34 Higgins, Victor, 219 Higonnet, Anne, 67, 142 Hill-Stead Museum (Farmington, Connecticut),

Hall, Radclyffe, The Well of Loneliness, 212 Hamilton, Alexander, 33 Hamilton, Mary, 265n33 Hampton, Mrs. J. Wade, 233n43 Hapgood, Hutchins, 171 Haraway, Donna, 116 Harlem Sewing Room (New York), 157 Harrison, Joseph, 83 Harrison, Sarah Poulterer, 83, 85, 244n69 Hartford Daily Courant, 143 Hartford Decorative Arts Society, 40 Hartford Soldier’s Aid Society, 39 Hartford Union for Home Work, 237n93 Harvard University, 116, 159, 204, 299n99 Hassam, Childe, 226n21; The Room of Flowers, 6, plate 1 Havemeyer, Henry, 128 Havemeyer, Louisine Elder, 11, 18, 96, 128–31, 130, 135, 246n87; art in activism of, 128– 30; “Ship of State,” 129, 129; Sixteen to Sixty, 128; “The Suffrage Torch,” 130 Hearn, George A., 265n34 Hearst, George, 101, 105–6, 105, 106, 115, 254n28, 256n42 Hearst, Phoebe Apperson, 3, 5, 10, 93–97, 99– 108, 105, 106, 111–16, 129, 131, 157, 256n42, 256n47, 259n90; “California as a Field for

143 Hilton, Henry, 80 Hitchcock, Henry Russell, 165, 166; The International Style, 166 Hitchcock, Sarah, 67, 245n72 Hobson, Barbara Meil, 25 Hoganson, Kristin, 109 Hokinson, Helen E., 263n6 home: cult of, 44, 57, 61, 136–37, 164–66; male retreat into, 10, 76–77, 138, 152, 201; see also domestic space Home, Henry, Lord Kames, 7 Homer, Winslow, 161 homosexuality, 176–77; embodied viewing and, 43; and erotic appeal of paintings, 67; see also lesbianism homosociality. See sisterhood Hooper, Alice Sturgis, 86, 244n69, 250n145, 250n146 Hooper, Samuel, 86 Hopkins, Mark, 100

Women’s Activities,” 111; as decorative arts champion, 9, 10, 103–4, 106, 113, 118–19; and fantasy, 93, 112, 119, 125; Hacienda del Pozo de Verona, 8, 9, 112–15, 113, 114, 119, 122, 124; and Panama Pacific International Exposition, 18, 92–95, 102–4, 106, 108, 120–27; at San Francisco Preparedness Parade, 94, 252n4; Shinn and, 62, 244n69,

Hopkins, Mary Frances Sherwood, 100, 259n94 Horney, Karen, 159 Hosley, William, 40, 238n100

253n12; and son’s enthusiasm for collecting, 101, 114–15, 118; and suffrage movement, 11, 93–94, 108, 126, 128, 130, 135,

Hudson River School, 40 Huizinga, Johan, Homo Ludens, 51 Hull House (Chicago), 148

252n4; and University of California, 116, 117, 118–20, 255n29 Hearst, William Randolph, 101, 112, 114–15, 118, 258n79

300

Hunt, William Morris, 131 Huntington, Arabella Duval Yarrington, 100 Huntington, Colis, 47, 100

•

INDEX

Hutchinson, Charles, 110 Huxley, Aldous, 159 Icelandic sagas, 69 identity, 5, 177, 178; fragility of, 26; fragmented, 144, 189, 195, 209; and gendering, 4, 64, 139; home in woman’s, 10, 23, 71, 110, 164; and objects, 10, 11, 12, 16, 19, 21, 38, 39, 61–62, 131, 140, 166, 177, 195, 200–202, 209 Impressionism, 110, 141 individualism, 26, 96, 191, 210; capitalism and, 78; domestic, 174; functionalism vs., 166; see also possessive individualism individuation, 3, 11, 26, 48, 62, 71, 74, 92, 213 Industrial Revolution, 10, 44 Institute of Musical Arts, 269n87 International Style, 165 International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 146–47 intersubjectivity, 74, 151 invisibility, and women, 44, 46, 50, 54, 57, 92, 177, 210 Italian Mission (New York), 64 Italian painting, 30, 179; Primitive, 156; see also specific artists Jackson, Shannon, 148 Jacobs, Mary Frick Garrett, 204 James, Henry, 92, 132–33, 135; The Bostonians, 86, 133; Daisy Miller, 177; The Portrait of a Lady, 89, 177; The Spoils of Poynton, 71 James, William, 71, 86, 278n99 Jameson, Anna, 49–50, 241n22, 241n23; Companion to the Most Celebrated Private Galleries of Art in London, 49 Jameson, Frederic, 219 Japanese decorative arts, 52, 87, 152, 196, 200 Jarves, James Jackson, 62 Jefferson, Thomas, 7, 22, 23, 30, 33, 36 Jeffrey, Julie Roy, 253n13 Joan of Arc, 212 John, Augustus, 194 Johns Hopkins University, 193, 197, 200, 278n99 Johnson, Adelaide, Portrait Monument to Lucretia Mott, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Susan B. Anthony, 132, 133 Johnson, Catherine Birdsell, 244n69, 250n12

INDEX

Johnson, Eastman, Christmas Time, 78, 79, 80 Johnson, John G., 47 Johnson, Philip, 165, 166, 169; The International Style, 166 Johnston, Frances Benjamin, 104 Johnston, John Taylor, 40, 86 Jones, Mary Mason, 73 Jumel, Eliza Bowen, 2, 17, 20, 21–38, 40–42, 45, 57, 72, 73, 233n38, 233n43, 234n56, 236n72; background of, 21, 25–26; exhibition of collection of, 17, 21–23, 25, 29, 30, 33–35, 39, 237n88; in France, 17, 28–33, 235n61; individuation of, 17, 21, 22, 26, 29, 38; “masculine” style of, 22, 23, 24, 34; Saratoga Springs theater of, 26, 197, 232n26 Jumel, Stephen, 26–28, 31, 32, 235n60, 235n61 Jung, Carl, 4, 19, 193, 213–14, 217, 281n20; Memories, Dreams, and Reflections, 213 Kandinsky, Vasily, 169 Kant, Immanuel, 43, 52, 54 Katriel, Tamar, 113, 155–56 Kaulbach, Friedrich August, Edith Rockefeller McCormick, 208, 209 Kelley, Phebe, 25 Kent, Chancellor, 233n38 Kerber, Linda, 23 Key, Ellen, 190 Kidd, Mrs. A. E., 244n69, 245n72 Kimbel, Anthony, “A Parlor View in a New York Dwelling House,” 24 Kimmel, Michael, 4, 138, 150, 264n17 Kirby, Thomas, 48, 59, 244n63 Klein, Melanie, 12, 48, 50, 51, 189 Kneisel Quartet, 158 Knoedler’s Gallery (New York), 61, 129, 240n11 Krenn, Edwin, 215 Kress, Samuel, 254n27 Kroeber, Arthur, 191 Kuehne, Max, White Roses, 173 Kuh, Katharine, 140–51, 262n1 Kuntskammer, 23 Ladd, Anna Coleman, 260n102 La Farge, John, 6, 9 laissez-faire capitalism, 11, 78, 210 Lamb, Charles, 16

•

301

Lamb, Martha, The Homes of America, 36 Lambert, Eleanor, 161 La Motte, Ellen, 193–97, 195; The Backlash of War, 196 La Napoule Art Foundation, 190–91 Lancret, Nicolas, 113 Largillière, Nicolas de, 25 Lawrence, Thomas, 236n83 Leach, William, 11, 83 League for Industrial Democracy, 148 League of Nations, 196 League of Women Voters, 157 Lears, T. Jackson, 57, 78, 207 Leavitt Art Rooms, 58, 59, 59, 60, 244n60 Le Brun, Jean Baptiste Pierre, 30–31, 33 Le Clear, Thomas, 249n130 Le Clerc, Sébastien, 36 Le Corbusier, 164–65; The Decorative Art of Today, 165 Lehigh Valley Railroad, 83 Le Noir, Massacre of Innocents, 35 Leonardo da Vinci, 36 Leon y Escosura, Ingancio de, Samuel Putnam Avery in His Gallery, plate 6 Lerambert, Henry, The Gifts, 117 lesbianism, 172, 176–78, 182, 184, 185, 189, 193, 195, 198, 204, 212 Letzer, Jacqueline, 35 Lewis, R. W. B., 247n107 Lewis, Sally Heard, 137 Lewis, Sinclair, Babbitt, 263n6 Lewis, Wyndham, 137, 164 Lewisohn, Sam, 160 Liberator, 196 Library of Congress, 278n92

Loop, Jeannette, 249n130 Loos, Adolf, 164, 165 Lord, James, 183 Lorillard, Dorothea Ann, 64 Lorrain, Claude, 219 Lothrop, William Sturgis Hooper, 250n146 Louis XIV, King of France, 63 Louis XVI, King of France, 104, 109 Louis XVIII, King of France, 32 Louise, Princess, 102, 244n69 Louvre (Paris), 30, 33, 55; objets d’art in, 63 Lubar, Robert, 181–82 Luhan, Mabel Dodge. See Dodge, Mabel Luhan, Tony, 185 Lundborg, Florence, 260n117; The Riches of California (The Season of Fruits), 127, plate 8 luxury, 7, 12, 71; Jumel and, 17, 21; Morgan and, 45 Lynes, Russell, 159 Lyonnais school, 30 Mackay, Clarence, 101, 254n27 Mackay, John, 72, 254n27 Mackay, Louise Hungerford, 72, 101–2, 244n69, 250n12, 254n27, 255n29, 255n30, 255n31 Madison, James, 34 Magazine of Art, 48 Malbin, Lydia, 220 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition (1857), 84 Manet, Édouard, 194; Olympia, 195 Manhattan Trade School for Girls, 146, 148 Manifest Destiny, 40, 177 Margadant, Jo Burr, 5 Maria Theresa, Empress, 73 Marie Antoinette, 207; cult of, 211–13

Liebman, Aline Meyer, 166 Lippincott’s Magazine, 12, 13, 14, 16, 58, 249n136 Lippmann, Walter, 276n70

Mariemont (Ohio), 215–16, 216 Marks, Montague, 49, 56–57 Married Women’s Acts, 46, 80 Martineau, Harriet, 50

Lips, Hilary, 149 Little Italy Neighborhood Association, 146 Livingston, Edward, 33 Livingston, Robert, 33 Lobrichon, Timoléon, The Communists, 250n144

Martinez, Maria, 219 Marx Brothers, 263n6 masculinity, 16, 22, 115, 133, 138, 139, 149–50, 152, 264n17; see also gendering Masterpieces of the Centennial International Exhibition, The, 84, 85 maternalism, civic. See civic maternalism Mathews, Arthur, 260n117

Locke, Ralph, 263n6 Loewald, Hans, 14–15 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, “A Skeleton in Armor,” 69

302

•

INDEX

Matisse, Henri, 137, 153, 158, 181, 184, 194, 197, 199–200, 204, 279n116; Blue Nude, 181, 200, 201, 202; Festival of the Flowers in Nice, 202; Joy of Life, 181; “Notes of a Painter,” 153; Woman with a Hat, 181, 200 matrimony, patrimony vs., 80 matronage, 64, 78, 85, 86, 204 Maugham, Somerset, 159 May, Saidie Adler, 204 Maybeck, Bernard, 116, 117 McCarthy, Kathleen, 64, 144, 156; Women’s Culture, 2 McCormick, Cyrus, 47 McCormick, Edith Rockefeller, 2, 4, 19, 208, 209–11, 211, 212, 213–18; Edithton Beach, 207, 215–16, 215, 218; Jung and, 211, 213– 14; and nostalgia, 206, 207, 209, 211, 213, 215; Villa Turicum, 214, 214–15 McCormick, Harold Fowler, 210, 216, 281n20 McCracken, Grant, 151 McLean, John R., 256n45 McNay, Marion Koogler, 207, 218–19 McNeil, Peter, 270n106 Meade, Richard, 230n3 Medici, Catherine de, 116 Meier-Graefe, Julius, 136, 164 Meissonier, Ernest, 55, 61, 81 Melamed, Samuel, 210 Merle, Hughes; The Angels Offering, 40; Autumn, 65, 67 Metropolitan Fair (New York, 1864), 39; Fine Arts Committee of, 78 Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), 51, 58, 61, 204, 249n130, 254n27; founders of, 64, 73–74, 244n71; School of Decorative Arts, 142; Vanderlyn’s Versailles panorama at, 197; Wolfe’s bequests to, 64, 71, 246n84 Meurent, Victorine, 195 Meyer, Agnes Ernst, 5, 143–44, 166; Mental Reactions, 144, 145 Meyer, Eugene, 144 Mignard, Pierre, 25, 30, 36 Milhaud, Darius, 172 Miller, Lillian, 230n3 Millet, Jean-François, 55, 61, 73, 86, 87; The Angelus, 51, 52; The Shepherdess, 87 Minneapolis Institute of Arts, 259n90

INDEX

Mitchell, Martha Reed, 244n69 Mitchell, Silas Weir, 210, 211 Moderne style, 162, 163 Modern Gallery (New York), 144 modernism, 133–37, 140, 159, 168, 171–72, 176, 190; aesthetic of, 199; antidomestic conception of, 136–37, 164–67; architecture and, 164–66; cult of genius of, 179; and decorative arts, 136–37, 140–42, 162–67; definitions of, 139, 140; female, emergence of, 137, 196; French forebears of, 161; gendering of, 149–52, 169–71, 172–74; Italian Primitive painting and, 156; male, 194, 197; reductive discourse of, 167; reformist, 160; sexuality and, 193; shared roots with antimodernism, 207, 209; see also Armory Show modernist nostalgia, 19, 206–7, 209 Modigliani, Amedeo, 159, 168 monarchists, French, 31 Monroe, Elizabeth, 17, 28, 31 Monroe, James, 28, 31–32, 34 Montespan, Madame de, 30 Montgomery, Maureen, 247n109; “Gilded Prostitution,” 73 Morgan, Anne, 265n32 Morgan, Charles, 46 Morgan, Frances, 63 Morgan, H. Wayne, 58 Morgan, J. P., 11, 16, 40, 109, 128, 139, 142, 238n100, 265n32, 265n34 Morgan, Julia, 10, 114, 115, 123 Morgan, Mary Sexton, 3, 18, 45–54, 47, 62– 64, 71, 73, 91, 100, 241n22, 242n32; auction of collection of, 45–48; dealers’ relationship with, 46–47, 60–61; fantasy life of, 46, 48–50, 62, 89, 113; individuation of, 45, 48, 62; play in collecting of, 49, 50–53, 62; Shinn’s omission of collection of, 54, 58 Morrell, Ottoline, 178, 194, 195 Morris, Roger, 27 Morris, William, 10, 68, 69–70, 70 Morris-Jumel Mansion (New York), 27, 27 Morrison, Toni, 220 motivations. See collecting, motivations for Mott, Lucretia, 132, 133

•

303

Mount Holyoke College, 108 Mount Vernon, 278n92 Mulvey, Laura, 97 Murillo, Bartolomé Esteban, 115 Murray, John, 231n3 Museum for the Arts of Decoration (CooperHewitt Museum, New York), 1, 18, 78, 134, 139–42, 161, 164, 174, 278n92 Museum of Modern Art (New York), 1, 158, 171, 172, 191, 204; masculinist modernist aesthetic at, 137–38, 140, 149, 164–69, 174; women founders of, 1, 5, 18, 134, 137, 156, 157, 159–61, 166–67 exhibitions: Cézanne, Gauguin, Seurat, van Gogh, 160, 161; Fantastic Art, Dada, Surrealism, 167; Machine Art, 166; Modern Architecture: International Exhibition, 165; Objects 1900 and Today, 166 Museum of Non-Objective Painting, 134, 169, 169–70, 174 museums, women as founders of, 1, 17, 18, 42, 50, 61, 89, 91, 100, 134–75, 205, 219; and male resentment of, 5, 137–39, 167; see also specific women founders music, avant-garde, 135, 158, 172

New Man, 167, 176 Newsboys’ Lodging House (New York), 64 New School for Social Research, 148, 191 New Symphony Orchestra, 172 New Women, 18, 67, 92, 96, 110, 121, 171, 175, 176, 177, 190, 191, 205, 207; character traits of, 107–8, 200; intellectual companionship of, 110; male anxiety about, 167; professional lives of, 159; regendering of tastes of, 111, 202; sexuality of, 19, 176–77, 190; spatial parameters of first generation of, 94; suffragists and feminists and, 143; Wheeler on, 107 New York Board of Education, 158 New Yorker, 263n6 New York Evening Post, 34, 58 New York Herald Tribune, 169, 215 New York State Association Opposed to the Extension of Suffrage to Women, 143 New York Sun, 3, 47, 136 New York Times, 45, 48, 50, 72, 173, 174 New York World-Telegram and Sun, 215 Nickliss, Alexandra, 116 Night at the Opera, A (film), 263n6 Nineteenth Amendment, 96, 121, 127, 144; see also women’s suffrage

Napoleonic style, 30, 32, 63 Narducci, Enrichetta, 42; Marie Telfair, plate 3 Nation, 55, 58, 84, 86 National Academy of Design (New York), 35, 78 National Advocate, The, 34, 236n80 National Gallery (London), 22

nonobjective art, 168–71 Nordau, Max: Degeneration, 230n62; Pathology, 16 Norris, Margot, 274n20 Norse literature, 69 Northwestern University, 110 nostalgia, 205; modernist, 19, 206–7, 209; romantic, 207, 211, 213

National Gallery of Art (Washington, DC), 151, 204 National Mother’s Congress, 94, 111 National University Campus (Edithton Beach,

nudes, paintings of, 65, 67, 74

Wisconsin), 217, 217–18 National Woman’s Party, 94, 128, 130–32 National Woman Suffrage Association, 84–85, 103, 121, 132, 260n104 Native Americans, 85, 185, 207, 218–19 Navajos, 218 Naval Historical Foundation, 278n92

object cathexis, 48 object-relations theory, 12 Oja, Carol, 158 old master paintings, 24, 55, 74, 78, 86, 115, 129, 156, 177, 237n96, 240n11; bequests to museums of, 204; copies of, 29, 36, 101; domestic venues for exhibition of, 35, 74; Revolutionary and post-Revolutionary period purchases of, 22, 230n3; therapeutic effect of, 152 Olivier, Fernande, 176

Nazis, 184 neurasthenia, 76, 152, 210, 268n71 Newhouse, Victoria, 227n34 Newman, Beth, 46, 65

304

•

INDEX

organicism, Leo Stein on, 19, 176, 179, 273n1 Ostade, Isack van, 30 Otis, Harrison, 231n3 Packard, Artemas, 137, 167, 174 Paff, Michael, 36 Paget, Lord Arthur, 72 Paget, Minnie Stevens, 72, 247n109 Palace of Fine Arts (San Francisco), 94, 95, 118, 119, 259n94 Palmer, Bertha Honoré, 18, 96, 106–10, 196, 211; The Castle, 109, 111, 210; and gendering of female space, 109–10; and World’s Columbian Exposition, 96, 107, 108, 110 Palmer, Potter, 109; The Castle, 109, 111 Panama Pacific International Exposition (San Francisco, 1916), 18, 92–94, 102–4, 106, 110, 118–28, 122, 260n117, 261n132; California Building, 124–25, 125, 126, plate 8; Palace of Education, 121, 124; Palace of Fine Arts, 94, 95; Palace of Horticulture, 124; Palace of Varied Industries, 121; Women Voters Convention, 130; Women’s Board, 93, 108, 120, 121, 124, 125, 127, 260n117; YWCA Building, 121, 122, 123, 127–28 Paris Salon, 97, 98 Parker, Ann, 24 Parker, Rozsika, Old Mistresses, 56 Parkhurst, Helen, 159 Parson, Maysie Gasque, 211 Parsons, Edith Baretto, 260n102 Parsons, Elsie Clews, 189–91; Journal of a Feminist, 191; The Old-Fashioned Woman, 189–90 Parsons, Frank Alvah, 164; Interior Decoration, 164 Parsons School of Design, 18, 164 patrimony, matrimony in service of, 80 patronage, 33, 85, 116, 135, 220; of Armory Show, 157, 192; enlightened, 84; of music, 135, 158, 172; Renaissance, 39 Paul, Alice, 128 Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer, 86–87, 133 Peabody and Stearns, 67, 78, 246n94; Vinland, 68 Peabody-Essex Museum (Salem, Massachusetts), 37

INDEX

Peale, Charles Wilson, 23, 231n15 Peck, Orrin, Blessing the Flowers, 125 Pellerin collection, 194 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, 23, 85 Pepchinski, Mary, 128 Perkins, Thomas, 231n3 Persian decorative arts, 113, 153, 196 Pétain, Philippe, 184 Peters, Sarah Worthington, 57 phenomenology, 71 Philadelphia Bricklayer’s Association, 58 Philadelphia Museum of Art, 85, 250n141, 256n45 Philadelphia Times, 47, 60 philanthropy, women’s role in, 64, 80, 97, 115–16 Phillips, Duncan, 160 Picabia, Francis, 150 Picasso, Pablo, 137, 150, 151, 158, 176, 181–84, 197, 199, 279n116; La Coiffure, 202, 203; Girl with a Basket of Flowers, 181; Portrait of Gertrude Stein, 182, 183, 202 Pintard, John, 29 Pioneer Women of California, 252n4 Pius VII, Pope, 29 play, 14–15, 46, 50–51, 74, 197; collecting as, 14–17, 49, 50–52, 62, 113, 131, 149, 153, 155–56, 189, 196–97; communicative power of, 148–49; creative, 51, 112, 125, 156; “housekeeping,” 148, 149; ritual and, 112 Plaza Galleries (New York), 246n84 Poe, Edgar Allan, 249n122 Political Equality League, 132 Pollock, Griselda, Old Mistresses, 56 Pompadour, Madame de, 207 Pope, Arthur Urban, 118–19, 259n93; Survey of Persian Art, 118 Pope, Theodate, 143, 266n40 Port Folio, 36 Portland Art Museum, 137 possessive individualism, 7, 11, 18, 22, 23, 29, 34, 45, 71, 92, 96, 174, 178, 210; Dodge vs., 218 Post, Franz, 37; Africans Rejoicing, 37; Rural Landscape in Brazil, 38 Post, Marjorie Merriweather, 2, 212 Post-Impressionism, 151, 158, 168, 194 Pottier and Stymus, 99

•

305

practical solipsism, theory of, 179 Pratt Institute, 158; School of Household Science and Arts, 158 Pre-Columbian art, 207 Presbyterianism, 115 Preston, William C., 31 Prichard, Matthew, 194, 277n76 Prime, William Cowper, 238n100 Progressive Era: antifeminist backlash during, 137–39, 143; reform movement in, 39, 116, 120–21, 128, 159, 218; women collectors in, 18–19, 87, 92, 93–220; see also New Women Protestantism, 12, 27, 116 Prown, Jules, 2 psychoanalysis, 12, 14, 46, 74, 97, 186; fantasy in, 48–49; Jungian, 213–15; play in, 50–51 (see also play) Psychology Club, 213–15 Pueblo people/culture, 185, 207, 218–19 Pugh, David, 115 Puritanism, 45, 57, 70, 80, 177 Pyne, Kathleen, 76

Richardson, Jonathan, 241n23 Riddle, John, 266n40 Riddle, Oscar, 191 Rigby, Douglas, 22 Rigby, Elizabeth, 22 Roberts, Cecil, 159 Roberts, Marshall, 244n71 Roberts, Susan Endicott, 62, 244n69, 244n71, 245n72 Robins, Margaret Dreier, 148 Robins, Raymond, 148 Rochberg-Halton, Eugene, The Meaning of Things, 50–51 Rockefeller, Abigail Aldrich, 14, 19, 152–53, 154, 155–59, 164, 174, 218; as Armory Show patron, 137, 192; Moderne style preferred by, 162, 163; and Museum of Modern Art, 5, 137, 156, 157, 159–61, 167, 168; and play, 153, 155, 156; and restoration of Colonial Williamsburg, 207; “Top-side” gallery, 153, 154, 155, 155–56, 163 Rockefeller, John, Jr., 16, 74, 152–53, 154, 156, 207, 213 Rockefeller, John, Sr., 11, 74, 209, 210, 213

Quakers, on women, 57 Queen Isabella Association, 108 Quinn, John, 137, 159, 200

Rockefeller, Nelson, 156, 167 Rockefeller Center (New York), 155 Rogan, Bjarne, 10 Romantic art, 110 Roosevelt, Theodore, 138 Rosa, Salvator, 30 Rosenfeld, Paul, 138 Rosenthal, Gertrude, 204 Rothenstein, William, 194 Rothschild family, 47 Roualt, Georges, 159

Radcliffe College, 87 Rand School of Social Science, 148 Raoux, Jean, 30 Raphael, 36 Ray, Man, 183 Rebay, Hilla, 18, 168–71, 173, 174, 204, 271n123 Reconstruction, 56 Redon, Odilon, 158 Reed, Christopher, 166–67 Reisner, George, 112

Roullier, Alice, 262n1 Rousseau, Henri, 197 Rubens, Peter Paul, 35 Rudnick, Lois, 4, 144, 275n40 Ruskin, John, 67, 86 Russia, railroads in, 83 Ryan, Mary, 65

Renaissance, 39, 113, 187, 254n27; art academies of, 54; bronzes, 45; gardens, 207 Renaissance-revival style, 99 Reni, Guido, 30 Renoir, Auguste, 158, 181 Republicans, Jeffersonian, 33 Revolutionary War, 27, 64 Ribera, Jusepe de, St. Peter Delivered from Prison

Ryder, Albert Pinkham, 50, 161 Ryerson, Martin, 110 Saarinen, Aline, The Proud Possessors, 2 Sabin, James, “The Leavitt Art Rooms,” 60

by an Angel, 35

306

•

INDEX

Sachs, Paul, 159, 161 Sage, Olivia, 115 St. Philip’s Church (New York), 64

Sheeler, Charles, 207 Sheldon, George, Artistic Houses, 109

Salon d’Automne (Paris, 1905), 199 Sanborn, Helen Peck, 120, 125 San Francisco Art Association, 118, 259n94 San Francisco Arts Commission, 260n117 San Francisco earthquake (1906), 120, 127 San Francisco Institute of Art, 118, 259n94 Sanger, Margaret, 157 Sanitary Commission, U.S., 39 Santayana, George, 135 Sapphism, 177 Sargent, John Singer, Isabella Stewart Gardner, 89, 90 Satie, Erik, 172 Savage, Edward, 22 Schapiro, Meyer, 160 Schaus, William, 47, 47, 60, 61, 240n11 Schiller, Friedrich, On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 51 Schor, Naomi, 141 Schouler, James, 46 Schweinfurth, A. C., 258n79 scopophilia, 65 Scott, Ann Firor, 42 scrapbooks, 141–42 Scudder, Janet, 260n102 Searles, Edward, 259n94 Sears, Sarah, 193–94 Selassie, Haile, 196 Senate House Museum (Kingston, New York), 196, 278n92 Seneca Falls Declaration of Sentiments, 85 Seurat, Georges, 160, 161, 168 sexuality, 74, 184, 185, 191, 198; ambiguous,

Shinn, Earl (Edward Strahan), 54–58, 54, 69, 109, 243n54, 254n27; The Art Treasures of America, 18, 54–58, 61, 63, 67, 73, 84, 86, 243n47, 244n69; and Centennial International Exhibition, 84, 85; decorative arts disdained by, 54, 55, 57, 62, 83, 91; mercantile art patrons admired by, 56, 83–84, 249n136; and women collectors, 18, 54, 56–58, 61–63, 65, 67–68, 69, 72, 73–74, 78, 81, 83–87, 91, 92, 97–99, 244n69, 249n136, 252n12 Silverman, Deborah, 106 Simpson, Anna Pratt, 124; Problems Women Solved, 120 sisterhood, 135, 143, 157, 168, 172, 174, 204; at world’s fairs, 84–85, 103, 120–21 Sitwell, Edith, 159 Skiff, Frederick, 121 Slade School of Art, 158 Smith, Adam, Wealth of Nations, 210 Smith, Henrietta Caswell, 51, 52, 175 Smith, John Rubens (“Neutral Tint”), 34–36 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 44, 67, 121, 205 Smithsonian Institution (Washington, DC), 85 Société Anonyme, 134, 147–49; International Exhibition of Modern Art, 147, 147–48, 170 Society of Friends, 57

nineteenth-century, 42–44; erotic paintings and, 65, 67; liberation of, 176–78, 190; modernism and, 193; of New Women,

Sorbonne, 144 space, 97–98; Foucault on, 120; gendering of, 109–10; Jung on, 213; private vs. public, 61–62, 103, 122, 128, 131, 168, 174, 177, 205, 207, 220; struggle for, at world’s fairs, 103, 108, 121, 124; see also domestic space, and public realm Spencer, Niles, Bedside Table, 173 Spofford, Harriet, 92 Springer, Jane Kilgour, 244n69

171, 176–77, 190, 205; and taste (see taste, sexing of ); transgressive, 195, 202; see also homosexuality; lesbianism

Standard Oil, 209, 215 Stanford, Jane Lathrop, 93, 97, 99, 99–100 Stanford, Leland, Jr., 100

Seymour, Miranda, 194 Shakespeare, William, 78, 150 Shaw, Pauline Agassiz, 87

Stanford, Leland, Sr., 97–100, 99 Stanford University, 100 Stansell, Christine, 26, 143 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 84–85, 129, 132, 133, 172, 174

Shaw, Quincy Adams, 87 Shearer, Norma, 212

INDEX

•

307

Starr, Ellen Gates, 148 Stasz, Clarice, 210 Steichen, Edward, 76, 77, 144 Stein, Gertrude, 144, 172, 176–84, 182, 183, 194, 274n20; Cone sisters and, 197–200, 198; decorative arts and, 178, 180; Dodge and, 178, 185, 186, 189, 192, 193; identification with male modernist geniuses of, 5, 179, 181–84; sexuality of, 19, 176–78, 184, 195, 198 works: Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, 180, 191; Portrait of Mabel Dodge at the Villa Curonia, plate 11; Three Lives, 181; Two Women, 199 Stein, Leo, 5, 19, 176–81, 180, 185–87, 197–200, 273n1, 278n99; A-B-C of Aesthetics, 199; and decorative arts, 176, 179–81; Journey into the Self, 179; see also organicism Stein, Michael, 200 Steiner, Rudolf, 168 Steiner, Wendy, 6 Stella, Antoine Bouzonnet, 30 Sterner, Marie, 262n1 Sterner, Mary, Gallery (New York), 168 Stevens, Harry, 72, 73 Stevens, Marietta Reed, 72–73, 102, 142, 244n69, 245n72, 247n107, 247n109, 255n30 Stevens, Paran, 72 stewardship, ethic of, 116 Stewart, Alexander Turney, 78, 80–81, 82, 99 Stewart, Cornelia Clinch, 78, 80–81, 82, 91, 100, 244n69, 245n72, 249n130 Stewart, Susan, 76 Stieglitz, Alfred, 5, 144

Sugar Trust, 128 suffrage movement. See women’s suffrage Sullivan, Cornelius, 159 Sullivan, Mary Quinn, 157–59, 161–62, 164; and Museum of Modern Art, 137, 157, 158–59, 161–62, 167; Planning and Furnishing the Home, 158, 161, 161 Sunset magazine, 121 Supreme Court, U.S., 17, 25 Surrealism, 167, 204 Susman, Warren, 171 Sutton, James, 244n63 Symbolism, 139, 158 Taft, Anna Sinton, 142 Tarbell, Edmund, 49 Tascher de la Pagerie, Comtesse Henri, 17, 31–33 Tascher de la Pagerie, Comte Henri, 32–33 taste, sexing of, 11, 16, 19, 25, 56, 67, 68, 138– 39, 156, 200, 202, 204, 211; Steins and, 176, 179–81; Telfair on, 43 Taunton, Lord, 250n145 Telfair, Mary, 17, 39, 41–44, 57, 67, 91, 237n93, plate 3; independence of, 17, 42 Telfair Museum of Art (Savannah), 42 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 187 Thaxter, Celia, 226n21 Theocritus, 127 Theosophy, 149, 164, 170, 267n58 “thingness,” 87 Thorndike, Israel, 231n3 Tibetan paintings, 196 Tiffany, Charles Comfort, 68–69 Tiffany, Louis Comfort, 107, 129, 147, 265n32 Tiffany & Company, 51, 242n32

Stotesbury, Eva Roberts, 212 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 12, 63; The American Woman’s Home, 57, 210

Tile Club, 58 Titian, 89; Rape of Europa, 90, 91 Toklas, Alice B., 176, 180, 181, 184, 195, 274n20 Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri de, 159; May Belfort in

Stowe, William, 235n58 Strahan, Edward. See Shinn, Earl Stravinsky, Igor, 172

Pink, 163 Trachtenberg, Alan, 138 transitional objects, 12, 14, 51, 89, 131, 166, 189 travelers, women, 124, 177–78 Travelers’ Aid Society, 124 Troyon, Constant, 73

Stuart, Mary McCrea, 60 Sturges, Mrs. Russell, 83, 244n69 Sturgis, Anne, 86 Stürm, Der (Berlin), 168 subjectivity, 71, 175, 184; female, 5, 41, 95–97, 102; modern, fragmented nature of, 144, 184, 188–89, 195; see also identity

308

true womanhood, cult of. See cult of true womanhood Trumbull, John, 21, 29–31, 33–34, 54, 236n83

•

INDEX

Tryon, Dwight William, 76 Tuckerman, Henry, Book of Artists, 56 Turkish rugs, 81, 113

Wallach, Alan, 40 Walters, William, 47, 55, 74 Warner, Gertrude Bass, 14 Warren, Susan Clarke, 87 Washington, George, 27, 64

Turner, J. M. W., The Slave Ship, 86 291 (journal), 144 University of California, 93, 116, 118, 119, 260n117; Anthropology Department, 116; Hearst Hall, 116, 117, 118, 255n29; Mark Hopkins Institute of Art and, 259n94 University of Nevada, Reno, 255n29 University of North Carolina, 279n116 University of Oregon, 14 University of the State of New York, 164 Vallotton, Félix, 279n116 Vanderbilt, Alva Smith, 11, 96, 130–32, 142, 171, 261n132, 262n133, 262n135; Marble House, 131–32, 132, 191; and play, 131; in suffrage campaign, 11, 18, 128, 130, 132, 135, plate 9 Vanderbilt, Maria, 62 Vanderbilt, William H., 9, 9–10, 45, 56, 60, 131, 244n59 Vanderbilt, William Kissam, 131 Vanderlyn, John, 33, 34; Versailles, 26, 197, 232n26 van Dyck, Anthony, 35, 36 Vanity Fair, 153, 159 Van Rensselaer, Mariana, 69, 131 Varèse, Edgard, 172 Vatican, 55 Veblen, Thorstein, 72, 83 Velasquez, Diego Rodriguez de Silva, 115 Vernon, William, 230n3 Victoria, Queen of England, 74; Osborne House,

Washington Post, 144 Watson, Forbes, 174 Waugh, Evelyn, 193, 196; Black Mischief, 196; Remote People, 196 Weatherspoon Art Museum (Greensboro, North Carolina), 279n116 Weininger, Otto, Sex and Character, 184, 198 Weisberg, Gabriel, 212 Wellesley College, 160 Welter, Barbara, 44 West, Benjamin, 35, 236n83 Wharton, Edith, 71–73, 142, 265n32; The Age of Innocence, 71–73, 247n107; Decoration of Houses, 71; The House of Mirth, 71 Wheeler, Candace, 3, 69, 107, 108, 141, 164, 265n32; Household Art, 69 Wheeler, Monroe, 158 Whistler, James Abbott McNeill, 10, 68, 76, 197, 260n117; Purple and Rose, 14, 15, 48–49; Yellow Buskin, 250n141 White, Antonia, Frost in May, 212 Whites, LeeAnn, 44 Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt, 18, 135, 157, 168, 170–74, 177, 192, 204, 261n132, plate 10; Walking the Dusk, 173 Whitney Museum of American Art (New York), 1, 134, 168, 173–74 Whitney Studio Club (New York), 172; Spring Exhibition—Flowers in Art, 173 Wilde, Oscar, 11, 68, 187

74 Vienna International Exhibition (1873), 102 Vikings, 69

Wildenstein Galleries (New York), 37, 151 Wilhelm, Kaiser, 210 Wilson, Richard Guy, 109 Wilson, Woodrow, 128

vision, sexual politics of, 65 Vivés collection, 265n34 Vollard, Ambroise, 194

Wilstach, Anna, 83, 85, 244n69, 250n141 Wilstach, William, 83 Wind, Edgar, 159

von Falke, Jacob, Art in the House, 74, 76 Vorse, Mary Heaton, 276n70 Vorticism, 274n20

Winnicott, D. W., 12, 14, 15, 51, 189 Wolfe, Catharine Lorillard, 5, 62–65, 67–71, 73, 77, 244n69, 245n72, 246n84, 246n94,

Wadsworth Atheneum (Hartford), 39, 40 Wallace Collection (London), 109

plate 7; identity expressed in collecting of, 63, 67, 69, 73; philanthropy of, 64, 70, 73; Vinland, 67–69, 68, 70, 111, 247n110

INDEX

•

309

Wolfe, John David, 64 Wolff, Janet, 167–68 Woman Suffrage Party, German-American Committee of, 147 Woman’s Congress (San Francisco, 1895), 120 Women’s Art School, 265n33 Women’s Political Union, 128–30 women’s suffrage, 50, 86–87, 92–94, 96, 103, 108, 116, 127, 129–32, 135, 191; in California, 120–21, 125–26; female opponents of, 143–44; male backlash against, 132–33; see also Nineteenth Amendment Women’s Trade Union League, 148 Women’s World’s Fairs (Chicago, 1925–28), 216, 219 Woodward’s Gardens (San Francisco), 101, 101, 254n25 Woolf, Virginia, 135, 172

310

Working Women’s Hotel, 80 World’s Columbian Exposition (Chicago, 1893), 11, 92, 102, 107–10, 120, 124, 127, 210; Board of Lady Managers, 107, 108, 110; Children’s Building, 108; Woman’s Building, 107, 108, 128; Palmer and, 96, 107, 108, 110 world’s fairs, 102–3, 120; women travelers at, 124; see also specific world’s fairs World War I, 127, 144, 195–96, 252n4 World War II, 184, 219 Yale University, 149 Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), 111, 112, 122–24, 157; convention at Hacienda del Poza de Verona, 113 Zayas, Marius de, Mental Reactions, 144, 145 Zorach, William, 173

•

INDEX

text: 9.5/14 Scala display: Scala sponsoring editor: assistant editor: project editor: editorial assistant: copyeditor: indexer: designer: production coordinator: compositor: printer and binder:

Deborah Kirshman Eric Schmidt Sue Heinemann Lynn Meinhardt Jennifer Knox White Ruth Elwell Nola Burger Pam Augspurger Integrated Composition Systems Friesens