NMH Magazine : Spring 2006

Force of Nature

There is a photograph in existence of Juliana Force, tiny and uncertain, standing near the fireplace in the library of her apartment on Eighth Street, just west of Fifth Avenue. In front of her stretch broadly flowered Brussels carpets, invisibly sewn together. Above her hang four enormous lamps, their globes grasped in the talons of gilded eagles, raised and lowered by silken cords. A profusion of chairs, urns, alabaster ornaments, statuary, bibelots, and paintings threatens to overwhelm her. It is one of the rare occasions when she was dwarfed by her surroundings instead of dominating them.

The opulent setting reflected the owner’s reputation as a vivid personality and someone with an eye that ranged far beyond the boundaries of regulation taste. The suite of rooms, which no visitor ever forgot, took up the top two floors of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the center of her career and affections.

At about the same time this portrait was taken, a feature writer and editor named Allene Talmey interviewed Mrs. Force, as everyone invariably called her, for a profile that appeared in Vogue on February 1, 1940. Talmey’s assignment was to write a series on New Yorkers in the public eye. The patrician Juliana Force—first director of the Whitney Museum, art patron and impresario, agent and representative of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney—was a natural choice to inaugurate the series.

At first Juliana’s status and largesse derived from Gertrude Whitney, the vastly wealthy sculptor and socialite who put her name and fortune at her associate’s disposal. Their partnership lasted more than three decades, until Gertrude’s death in 1942. From the early teens until her own death in 1948, Juliana made the Whitney Museum and the clubby artists’ galleries that were its predecessors the greatest sponsors of living American artists in the nation. Ignoring names and rules, Juliana backed her judgments decisively by purchasing works by artists she liked and believed in. Her dedicated, doughty championship of American painting took many forms. She scouted and subsidized artists, bought what they created, supported scholarship in the field of art history, lobbied for protective legislation, and presided over a full schedule of exhibitions. Gertrude Whitney paid the bills, but Juliana Force ran the show.

Juliana changed the notion of how a museum should look and what it should entail. The conventional function of a museum was to be a repository of the past; its halls were swathed in dark draperies, and the atmosphere was thick with gloom. The existence of the working artist was acknowledged only reluctantly, if at all. Juliana’s special and courageous insight—commonplace enough now, but an innovation then—was a wholehearted repudiation of this tenuous, impersonal tie between artists and museums.

First and foremost, she stood for living artists, for guarding their rights and ensuring their future. She felt as much responsibility toward artists as to the objects they created. Accordingly, the Whitney frequently was less interested in collecting unimpeachable masterpieces than in nurturing and stimulating artistic creativity. Juliana once interrupted a roomful of museum directors guilty of proposing abstruse theories on the most proper means of encouraging art with, “If you love a woman, marry her. If you like a painting, buy it.”

She rejoiced in seeing for the simple pleasure of seeing. She urged people to trust their intuitive emotional responses to a work of art and teased them out of worrying about names, fashionable reputations, or established market prices. Her brisk credo, entitled “Think for Yourself” and articulated in a speech given in 1932, included the following advice:

Go directly to the work of art and face it alone. Do not remember anything that anybody has said about it.…Buy pictures, not names. The last thing to interest you in a work of art is the name of the artist. Pictures should be seen, not heard!

No matter how imperious or overbearing she grew, Juliana did not use her position for personal aggrandizement. Her power was an instrument for artistic freedom. If she fought, she almost always had some object other than herself in mind. This is why, regardless of the impact Juliana had on the social history of the visual arts in America and the sturdy hand she gave to hundreds of artists who had nowhere else to turn, her name is virtually unknown. There is no physical monument to her in the Whitney Museum. Nor would she have wanted one.

Juliana was a mercurial compound of brains, frivolity, rebelliousness, luck, and—as perhaps is inevitable with those who fulfill themselves through the achievements of others—impermanence. Her renown was bound up with the critical fortunes of the young men and women she promoted. The Whitney befriended or crucially aided such artists as Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, John Sloan, Robert Henri, William Glackens, Charles Sheeler, Charles Demuth, Joseph Stella, Rockwell Kent, Edward Steichen, Isamu Noguchi, and Thomas Hart Benton. In each case, Juliana gambled on her instinctive sympathy with the person instead of taking the wiser—and utterly uncharacteristic—course of waiting for history to bless him.

But such verdicts were for the future. When Vogue writer Allene Talmey met Juliana, she saw before her the embodiment of money and privilege: a chic, urbane woman who mingled with Whitneys and Rockefellers. She was dressed by Mainbocher and photographed by Cecil Beaton. She owned houses in New York State, Pennsylvania, Connecticut, and England.

Talmey appraised Juliana as “dependably indiscreet, brutally witty, she talks effectively, constantly, sparing no feelings, letting people know exactly where they stand.” This tart summary was wrong in one important respect. Juliana was abrasively candid and dependably indiscreet, except when the conversation turned to two sensitive subjects: Gertrude Whitney or her own origins and background. She remained silent about the first out of love and loyalty; she offered fables about the second out of pride and misguided shame. She believed she had a great deal to hide.

Her deception went beyond the usual feminine fibs about age, although Juliana habitually gouged five to 20 years off that. Relating how Gertrude Whitney enlisted Juliana’s services in 1908, Talmey reported:

Up to that moment, Mrs. Force had had no experience, no training, no Fogg Museum coaching…to prepare her for gallery running. She was just a pleasant girl who had been born some twenty years previously in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. Most of her childhood had been spent with…books; about the only art, in the formal sense, was her father’s collection of steel engravings. Instead of going off to Wellesley College, as she planned at eighteen or so, she taught English at a small New England private school, and finally became secretary to Mrs. Whitney.

This account implies that Juliana was a frail adolescent creature of genteel antecedents born in 1888. She was supposedly a lady with an independent income whose social position was just a shade less exalted than that of her employer, a Vanderbilt married to a Whitney. No mention was made of her maiden name, her large crop of brothers and sisters, or that she was a twin. In truth, Juliana Rieser Force was a first-generation American born in 1876, the daughter of a poor tradesman. Although born in Doylestown, Pennsylvania, she had grown up unhappy and discontented in Hoboken, New Jersey. Earning a living was a necessity, not an option. Hers was a far more classic—and interesting—American success story than any magazine editor suspected.

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From Rebels on Eighth Street: Juliana Force and the Whitney Museum of American Art by Avis Berman. Reprinted with the permission of the author.

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