The New Art Gallery
Society
PICASSO’S GOAT! LITTLE
ALEXANDER, WITH A GLASS OF Scotch whiskey in one hand, lolls on the
base of Picasso’s immortal bronze goat. His other hand is hooked
like a coat hanger over the nose of the goat as if he intends to
hang forever from this baggy-dugged milestone of Culture in the
lobby of the Museum of Modern Art. It is sacrilege, God knows. This
is Picasso’s goat. The occasion is the reopening of the Museum of
Modern Art. The Museum was closed for certain renovations, and the
building of a new wing. All it took was six months. But, my god,
the reopening of this place turns out to be a stupendous occasion.
Everybody who was invited came—except Salvador Dalí—and only big
donors, big socialites, big politicians, big artists and a few
satellites were invited. Thousands, literally thousands, about six
thousand, are caroming around the place, careening, ricocheting
amid a lot of 1930-Modern rectangles and a yellow haze like the
Ninth Avenue end of the Port Authority bus terminal. They are all
wearing dinner clothes and high-waisted gowns and glaring at Little
Alexander, who dangles from Picasso’s goat and stares back. How
insolent! How epicene!
Oddly enough, Little Alexander is proof
of just how stupendous the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art
is. He is one of those thin young men who live in
one-and-a-half-room apartments, as they are known in New York, but
at perfectly fine addresses, such as East 55th Street, and come
out, when summoned, to escort rich, splendid, dazzling but aging
women. It has to be a pretty fine occasion or they aren’t going to
the trouble of getting someone like Little Alexander. As for
himself, he has only to worry that someone like his current charge,
Mrs. Annette————, will drink too much and conclude, in the dawn,
that it is she, at last, who will be able to coax passion out of
this beautiful boy.
Already Annette, in a gown like an
Arthur Rackham soul bird, is abroad in the museum garden. She is
circling like a sea pigeon around this and that splendid group. Out
in the garden, near the new black pools, which, for a fact, look
like rectangles in the architect’s drawing, stands Saul Steinberg,
the artist, with the face of a Bronx cleaning and pressing
shopowner, talking to Zaidee Parkinson—a daughter of the Parkinsons
who helped found the museum thirty-five years ago—a beautiful girl,
and the others, charming people, about mnemonics:
“ … and then 2 and 1 and 4 and 8
…”
“Well, I never in my life, if you know
what I mean!”
Up on the terrace, Stewart Udall, the
Secretary of the Interior of the United States, is sort of
aw-shucksing around, wearing a white dinner jacket and a crew cut,
still looking as though he is standing on the free throw line in
the school gymnasium in June wondering if he is going to ask
anybody to dance. Stewart Udall is talking to Nicole Alphand, the
wife of the French Ambassador. Madame Alphand is still a symbol of
all that is, at this late date, still glamorous about the
diplomatic life. On the other side of the terrace, across the
bobbing heads, Mrs. Jacob Javits, Marion Javits, the wife of the
Senator from New York, is standing just beyond the welded legs of a
huge black widow spider by Alexander Calder. Mrs. Javits would
probably be the symbol of what little remains glamorous about the
life of congressmen, but most of the time she won’t go near
Washington. Both of them, Nicole Alphand and Marion Javits, are
caught in the strange spot, on the one hand, of not quite being
celebrities themselves but being, on the other hand, more than just
wives of the illuminati. All sorts of people are paying court to
Helena Rubinstein, looking serene as a Taoist mask; she is
currently a local heroine because when robbers broke into her
apartment, she said, “Go ahead and kill me; I’m an old woman and
I’m not going to give my jewels to two ferrets like you,” and they
fled without them. Jacques Lipchitz, the sculptor, walks by, and
Kathy Marcus walks by. Ah, good for Kathy Marcus. She is East Texas
turning right into the boutique-land of East 64th Street.
Beautifully! And in the middle of the caroming mob, in the doorway
from the new wing to the garden, while the Burns guards gaze,
Huntington Hartford, the millionaire who opened his own museum in
New York last March, is saying: “I haven’t seen so many people
since J. Paul Getty’s party and I lost everybody for three hours
there.”
The Burns guards have white ribbons up
in the garden between the pools and the terrace. On the pool side
are five thousand people, haunch to paunch, who merely gave a
hundred dollars or a couple of thousand or something of the sort to
the building fund for the museum’s new wing. They just have
unimpeachable, not staggering, credentials. The spotlights in the
garden beam down on their skulls with a pale ochre haze, as at a
night baseball game in Denison, Texas. On the terrace, on the other
side of the ribbons, stand the true illuminati, for example, Adlai
Stevenson and Lady Bird Johnson, the President’s wife. In a few
minutes she will address them all, in a drawl that sounds like it
came in by mail order from Pine Bluff, concerning God, Immortality
and Inspiration through Art for the free peoples.
Mark Rothko, the painter, is talking to
Thomas Hess, the executive editor of Art
News, and Frank O’Hara, the museum employee who writes poems
and blue plays, about the funny time Hedy Lamarr—it was Hedy
Lamarr’s birthday—about the funny time it was Hedy Lamarr’s
birthday and they were all in Franz Kline’s studio.
Hedy Lamarr and everybody and Mark
Rothko in Franz Kline’s studio in New York. And Adlai and Lady Bird
and Huntington and Nicole and Marion and Stewart and Zaidee and
Kathy and everybody standing around on the terrace of the Museum of
Modern Art. It doesn’t even seem unusual. There may have been a
time, sixty years ago, or whenever it was, when Renoir was walking
down a road and ran into Cézanne, who was stumbling down the road
dragging a big painting of some bathers, with one end of it bumping
up and down in the dust. Well, he told Renoir, he was taking this
over to a friend who liked it who was very sick. Fat chance of any
of that bohemian homefolks stuff going on today. Today Robert
Rauschenberg does some comic paintings, now known as Pop Art, for a
couple of years and here he is in dinner clothes and a seat of
honor at the Museum of Modern Art, being lionized by Adlai and Lady
Bird and Nicole and the rest. Today the world of art in New York,
the world of celebrities, the world of society, press agents,
gossip columnists, fashion designers, interior decorators and other
hierophants have all converged on Art, now in a special, exalted
place. Art—and the Museum of Modern Art in particular—has become
the center of social rectitude, comparable to the Episcopal Church
in Short Hills. The people involved look to the opening of new art
gallery shows the way they used to look to theatre openings. Today
they consider a theatre opening pretty bland stuff, unless it is at
least Richard Burton in Hamlet. But the
galleries! Sometimes two or three or more galleries will get
together and assemble the work of a major painter, such as they did
in the spring of 1962 with Picasso, or last spring with Braque.
They divide up a man’s lifework among them, and the grand opening
is like a cattle call, with all these people roaring in clusters
from one gallery to another on and right off Madison Avenue,
plastering each other with social kisses and blazing away with
150-watt eyeballs.
The thing is, then, that the reopening
of the Museum of Modern Art is the biggest gallery opening
possible. It was only closed six months, but never mind. When it
reopens, it is a state occasion. The wife of the President of the
United States delivers the re-inaugural address. The Cabinet is
there, the diplomats are there, Adlai Stevenson, Ambassador to the
United Nations, is there. The clergy is there; some noted Chicago
preacher is reading the text of an address by Paul Tillich, the
theologian, who prepared a sacred discourse for the occasion. The
new realm of man’s holy spirit!
Years ago a nice woman with a million
dollars’ worth of real estate she wanted to dispose of in some
devout way would have left it to the church. But Mrs. E. Parmalee
Prentice left both her town houses on West 53rd Street to the
museum. It seemed only natural and proper. Then the new wing goes
up. No church building fund, except for some Mormon churches, ever
piled up so fast. They stormed the place with tens, hundreds of
thousands, millions at a time. In the banquet hall, David
Rockefeller extends his big right hand like a frond toward the
chairman of the fund drive, Gardner (Mike) Cowles, the publisher,
who stands with a large red flower in his buttonhole and his teeth
ablaze.
And then David Rockefeller is telling
how he remembers when he was a little boy just watching and
listening on those afternoons back in 1928 when Mr. and Mrs. John
D. Rockefeller, Jr., and Lizzie Bliss and A. Conger Goodyear and
the Parkinsons and the others were sitting down in the
Rockefellers’ living room to found a museum of modern art, which
they did, the next year. Modern Art had no uphill battle in
America, not with Rockefeller, Goodyear, Bliss, all that
irresistible, golden cachet. They had discovered Modern Art in
Europe, where it was fashionable in the 1920’s. It became
fashionable in the United States from the moment the group founded
the Museum of Modern Art in 1929. In fact, they had to go into the
provinces and beat the bushes to find enough opposition to Modern
Art to give the project a sense of spiritual mission, wicked
outrage and zest. And today—they rally behind modern art in
Kaffeeklatsches at the supermarkets in
Bethesda.
Only six hundred people could be
invited to the dinner at the reopening, and there were a few
heartaches over that. Outside, the six thousand other culturati,
who will stand behind the white ribbons in the garden, are still
piling up in front of the new main entrance. Marvelous! The
poor—the poor artists—are picketing the place. In front of the
museum, men and women debouch from back seats in a billow of
couturier colors and ribbed silk and on the other side the police
have backed up the poor artists and the bystanders behind the
barricades in front of America House and other places across the
street. The artists are marching with placards bearing huge
question marks. The artists are from the Artists-Tenants
Association and the question they are asking is, What do you fat,
posh, splendid, starched consumers of culture really care about
art? What are you doing to see to it that the City of New York
allows us—the progenitors of the art and of the openings of the
future, the carriers of the sacred standard—to keep our lofts? The
leader, Jean-Pierre Merle, short, slight, wearing a marvelously
elaborate mustache, runs back and forth across the street,
delivering manifestos and appeals to the museum, passing out
buttons bearing the symbol, the question mark.
Inside, William Burden, former
Ambassador to Belgium, is talking surrounded by yellow felt. Felt
lines the walls of the room and bears the signatures, blown up
huge, of the entire pantheon—Picasso, Matisse, Cézanne, Braque,
Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, him, too, all of them. At
Huntington Hartford’s table sits Edward Steichen, the immortal
photographer, eighty-five years old, who can look up from the table
and see his own signature a foot high on the yellow felt. Across
the table, his wife, Joanna, who is thirty-one years old, sits
there with the smile of the queen who tells no secrets. Steichen’s
beard is full, long and squared off at the bottom. He wears clear
plastic spectacles and sits up straight. One has only to look and
almost see a magenta ribbon of silk stretching across his shirt
front with little taffeta pools of shadow on it and maybe a
sunburst here and there on his dinner jacket. But of course. What
is the Museum of Modern Art but the American academy? The Royal
Academy in London—the National Academy in Paris—a hundred, a
thousand dinners with thin crystal, long-tined lobster forks, aging
aesthetes, art, honor and national glory. Somebody comes up and
hands Steichen a plum-colored velvet pouch. He peers down through
spectacles and eases the drawstrings open in what is known as a
stately manner. It is a gift from Shirley Burden, the Ambassador’s
brother, celebrating the opening of the museum’s new photography
gallery, named after Steichen. Steichen reaches in the pouch and
pulls out a miniature silver candlestick. Huntington Hartford looks
over, Mrs. Edward Hopper looks over. He sets it up on the table and
the poor artists are hollering for lofts in front of America
House.
Six hundred leading artists were
invited to the reopening of the Museum of Modern Art. Except for
twelve who were asked to dinner, they are all waiting out on the
sculpture terrace. About 9:30 everybody leaves the banquet hall and
already there are six thousand minor culturati packed behind the
ribbons in the garden. There are no lights on the terrace, and the
six hundred artists are waiting up there like sacred monsters in a
pen. The six hundred dinner guests follow Mrs. Johnson, and the
television crews and the reporters and the photographers following
Mrs. Johnson, and the hustling, elbowing procession is like a
flying wedge, plowing into the artists and driving them back into
their own corner.
Six hundred sacred egos are getting
batted around. It is dark up there, and nobody recognizes these
damned artists anyway, especially in dinner jackets. Somehow
Jean-Pierre Merle materializes up there with his question mark
buttons, and some of the artists, the guests of honor, start
saying, Here, give me one of those damned buttons, man, like we’re
tired of being batted around up here. J————, the abstract
expressionist, has had enough of this He jostles and elbows his way
down the steps from the terrace, glares at the Burns guards, glares
at Babe Paley, even though she looks like a million dollars, and
then he comes upon Little Alexander, hanging from Picasso’s goat.
He just stops. “What the hell—,” he says.
“Screw you,” says Little Alexander, in
his most forthright way.
J————doesn’t know what to do, so he
just turns around slowly, and in so doing he has an awful moment,
one of those awful moments when you find out that the despised
enemy is, after all, right. Through the plate glass, he can see
quite clearly in the garden another of those pieces of immortality,
the outstretched arms of “Mother and Child” by Jacques Lipchitz.
There are empty champagne glasses stacked all around it. One glass
is on top of another and up, up, up they rise like crystal stalks.
J————sinks, drowns, decays in the smell of old grape and the
morning after.
The Museum of Modern Art has reopened.
And Little Alexander hangs there from Picasso’s goat.