{"id":2152,"date":"2010-04-26T07:04:31","date_gmt":"2010-04-26T14:04:31","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/?p=2152"},"modified":"2020-04-29T15:05:00","modified_gmt":"2020-04-29T19:05:00","slug":"good-eye","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.portlandmonthly.com\/portmag\/good-eye\/","title":{"rendered":"Good Eye"},"content":{"rendered":"

May 2010<\/p>\n

She had incredible resources and graceful race horses. But young Joan Whitney Payson\u2019s true talent was unearthing overlooked masterworks by the likes of Picasso, Monet, and C\u00e9zanne. Travel with her as she crisscrosses the globe in search of fulfillment of her passion.<\/strong><\/p>\n

By Colin W. Sargent<\/em><\/p>\n

\"goodeye\"<\/p>\n

Now that the controversial documentary The Art of the Steal <\/em>has the NPR set abuzz by shining the spotlight on art aficionado Albert C. Barnes and what\u2019s happened to his collection since his death, it may well be time to revisit the colorful life and times of our own flapper\/collector, Joan Whitney Payson (1903-1975).<\/p>\n

Dr. Barnes acquired his first Picasso in Paris for less than $100, but Joan received her first painting as a gift.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PLANTING A SEED<\/strong><\/p>\n

At her 16th birthday party at the Whitney family\u2019s estate, earned with banking and railroad money, Joan untied the twine on a parcel wrapped in brown paper. The debutante, known for her bouncy disposition and short curls the color of champagne, was enchanted. As the celebration raged on, she couldn\u2019t take her eyes off Degas\u2019s Children and Ponies in a Park<\/em>, 1868. She was hooked.<\/p>\n

\u201cShe and her mother, Helen Hay Whitney, had seen it\u2026\u201d says Carrie Haslett, director of exhibitions and academic programs of the Terra Foundation for American Art in Chicago, \u201c\u2026at a New York auction house,\u201d another source familiar with the matter tells us. \u201cShe fell in love with it. Her mother, as an absentee bidder,\u201d planned that surprise.<\/p>\n

Dark and dreamlike, the painting charms with mystical woods that provide an almost supernatural background for three young girls frolicking with two ponies and a burro among what appear to be irises<\/em>. Most satisfyingly, the animals are in eternal balance: one coming, one going, the burro demonstrating his unpredictability and freedom by defiantly lying down, catching the viewer\u2019s eye. At the run, a white lamb rushes in to join the fun.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s the ne plus ultra<\/em> answer to the question, \u201cWhat do you give a horse-loving girl who already has <\/em>a horse?\u201d<\/p>\n

This study by Degas, never intended for public viewing, was the launch of Joan\u2019s evolving passion to collect not simply paintings as objets d\u2019art<\/em> or investments, but to capture and preserve the very intimate feelings she had for them as talismans able to conjure up adventures and memories in her own life. From the beginning, Haslett says, \u201cher collections were very personal.\u201d<\/p>\n

But was she truly ahead of her time in buying up Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works for a song?<\/p>\n

\u201cHer whole family was amazing in terms of its support of the arts,\u201d Haslett says. And while Joan\u2019s collecting \u201cwasn\u2019t singularly avant-garde among the upper classes, it is distinguished in its quality.\u201d<\/p>\n

Certainly, Joan risked offending the stodgy tastes of those who championed the sentiments of Royal Cortissoz, the popular critic who dismissed modernism as a \u201cPost-Impressionist illusion.\u201d Many a bejeweled hand in Newport\u2019s seaside castles still clung to renderings of sailboats, horses, and murky Grand Tour subjects by masters like Titian, Tintoretto, or, more likely, works done \u201cafter the manner of\u201d those giants.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Painting<\/strong><\/p>\n

Vincent van Gogh\u2019s Les Iris<\/em> stuns as no other painting can. According to Wikipedia, Theo van Gogh wrote to his brother Vincent: \u201c\u2018[It] strikes the eye from afar. The Irises<\/em> are a beauty study full of air and life.\u2019\u201d While painting it, Vincent (1853-1890) called it \u201c\u2018the lightning conductor for my illness.\u2019\u2019\u2019 While Wikipedia reports the first owner to be novelist, \u201cFrench art critic, and anarchist Octave Mirbeau, who was also one of van Gogh\u2019s first supporters,\u201d Scott Allan of the J. Paul Getty Museum has generously provided us with documents to support the following provenance for the masterpiece that \u201crepresents a patch of garden in the asylum at Saint-R\u00e9my, where van Gogh took refuge from May 1889 until May 1890 following his breakdown at Arles.\u201d*<\/p>\n

1889<\/strong>\u2013painted by Vincent van Gogh (Saint-R\u00e9my-de-Provence, France)
\n1889-1892<\/strong>\u2013Julien Tanguy (Paris, France), Vincent\u2019s \u201ccolor merchant\u201d and friend who attended his funeral.*
\n1892-1905<\/strong>\u2013sold to Octave Mirbeau (Paris, France), for \u201c600 francs\u201d* [Various other sources place the price between 250 and 600 francs, which we translate to a figure roughly between $2,000 and $12,000 in today\u2019s US dollars.]
\n1905<\/strong>\u2013sold to Auguste Pellerin (Paris, France) at Galerie Bernheim Jeune (Paris, France)
\n1925-1929<\/strong>\u2013sold to Jacques Doucet (Paris, France; Neuilly sur Seine, France) at Galerie Bernheim Jeune (Paris, France)
\n1929-1938\/1939<\/strong>\u2013by inheritance to Mme. Jacques Doucet (Neuilly-sur-Seine, France)
\n1938\/1939-1945\/1946<\/strong>\u2013Jacques Seligmann et Fils (Paris, France; New York, New York)
\n1945\/1946-1947<\/strong>\u2013purchased by M. Knoedler & Co. (New York, New York)
\n1947-1975<\/strong>\u2013sold to Joan Whitney Payson (New York, New York) for $80,000
\n1975-1987<\/strong>\u2013by inheritance to John Whitney Payson, who made it the centerpiece of the new Joan Whitney Payson Gallery of Art at Westbrook College in Portland, Maine, a most appropriate tribute to his mother.
\n1987-1990<\/strong>\u2013sold at Sotheby\u2019s, New York, November 11, 1987, lot 25, to Alan Bond (Perth, Australia), for $53.9 million, \u201cwith the controversial assistance of a $27 million loan from Sotheby\u2019s finance department. Bond\u2019s subsequent financial downfall and default led Sotheby\u2019s to repossess the picture just two years later in 1989.\u201d*<\/strong>
\n1990-Present<\/strong>\u2013sold \u201cfor an undisclosed sum\u201d* by Sotheby\u2019s to J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles. \u201cToday at auction, it would probably be worth $75-$80 million,\u201d says Mark Winter of Art Experts, Inc.<\/p>\n

*<\/strong>For provenance in greater depth, our source is Jennifer Helvey\u2019s Irises: Vincent van Gogh in the Garden, The J. Paul Getty Museum, 2009<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

NOT OUR JOAN!<\/strong><\/p>\n

And yes, young Joan traveled in those circles, spending summer visits at The Breakers, the pharaonic summer \u201ccottage\u201d built on the Newport oceanfront for railroad plutocrat Cornelius Vanderbilt.<\/p>\n

More specifically, if you tour The Breakers, the guide might allude to one of the upstairs bedrooms as the place where \u201clittle Joanie Whitney used to stay when she visited here.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019m surprised they tossed that in there,\u201d Joan\u2019s son John Whitney Payson has told us [Summerguide 1996]. \u201cOf course, her aunt was Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, so she might very well have visited there as a young girl.\u201d<\/p>\n

Clearly, this was a far different ingenue \u00a0than the dowager empress local Falmouth Foreside residents would claim to remember decades later from various interludes at her place here on Mussel Cove on Route 88, the summer Mainer entombed inside the sports-trivia chestnut that she single-handedly founded a little baseball team we like to call the New York Mets (her husband, Maine native Charles Shipman Payson, apparently didn\u2019t remotely share her interest in, and involvement with, the team).<\/p>\n

No<\/em>. This Joan was a tiara-wearing extrovert who was eminently capable of traveling in fast company that included (see our opening photo) Clark Gable, Marion Davies, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Carole Lombard, Countess Di Frasso (didn\u2019t they all lust for the royal titles), and Prince Serge Obelenski.<\/p>\n

THE RIGHT DEALER AT THE RIGHT TIME<\/strong><\/p>\n

And young Joan was not at all shy about practicing the art of the deal, especially during her many trips to Europe.<\/p>\n

As John Whitney Payson has told us, \u201cLe Favre was one of my mom\u2019s favorite galleries. Francois Dolt told me that Carman Messmore [the famous New York art dealer and chairman of Knoedler & Co.] took her to see Madame Marquet, widow of Albert Marquet, whose paintings she collected. It was five floors up, but if my mother wanted to get somewhere, she\u2019d get there. After a while, she used the powder room and saw that Albert Marquet had hand painted many of the tiles. She came out of there and tried to buy the powder room!\u201d<\/p>\n

How influential was Carman Messmore on Joan\u2019s evolving taste? As Messmore\u2019s granddaughter, Madelaine Messmore-Netter, says, \u201cHe didn\u2019t impose his own taste on his clients. He helped them discover their own. Here\u2019s an example of how he worked. I was in my early twenties when I was invited to attend a cocktail party with my grandparents in New York. My grandfather, who was in his nineties, took me aside and drew my attention to a woman in her mid-seventies. \u2018I want you to sit beside her at dinner,\u2019 he said. \u2018See how beautiful she is. Look at how her eyes are set back. Look at the lines on her face. Look at her jaw line and her lovely neck.\u2019<\/p>\n

\u201cIt was about learning to look at things.\u201dUp close, Messmore-Netter felt swept away.<\/p>\n

\u201cHe had a great way of making you see through to the truth.\u201d Just as mesmerizing was his gift for making his clients feel an intense \u00a0excitement for being alive.<\/p>\n

ARTISTIC SIBLING RIVALRY<\/strong><\/p>\n

As the seasons passed, Joan began an informal acquisition competition with her younger brother, John Hay \u201cJock\u201d Whitney (who would go on to amass a collection of over 70 paintings by 19th- and 20th-century European and American masters and serve as a National Gallery trustee from 1961 to 1979), though the way brother and sister went about it was as different as night and day:<\/p>\n

\u201cJock is highly recognized as a collector, and he sought that,\u201d Haslett says. \u201cOf course, it\u2019s not bad for visibility when you\u2019re publisher of the New York Herald Tribune<\/em> and U.S. Ambassador to England. I think the best man at his wedding was [Robert C. Benchley, with one of the groomsmen] Fred Astaire.\u201d<\/p>\n

In contrast, \u201chers was this personal collection, quietly assembled.\u201d<\/p>\n

Just as Albert Barnes\u2019s treasure trove \u00a0(rarely viewed until the late 1960s) bloomed, so did Joan Whitney Payson\u2019s private collection grow\u2013in the shade.<\/p>\n

SOUVENIRS OF HER TRAVELS<\/strong><\/p>\n

\u2022Which leads us to Irises<\/em>. When Joan purchased this painting, she was 44 years old. Visualize Salma Hayak, Cindy Crawford, Helena Bonham Carter, Janet Jackson .<\/p>\n

Irises<\/em> was purchased \u201cat an auction in 1947 through the guidance of a private dealer, Carman Messmore. She paid $80,000,\u201d John Whitney Payson told Limelight<\/em>:<\/p>\n

\u201cLegend has it that Mrs. Payson thought the price tag was too high. It was Messmore who encouraged her to make the purchase by teasing, \u2018Now Joan, don\u2019t be so stingy!\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cMy mother hung it over the fireplace in our living room in New York,\u201d John told the Associated Press in 1987, \u201cand it decorated the room with its red earth colors. It was her favorite painting.\u201d<\/p>\n

The resulting auction price for Irises<\/em> at Sotheby\u2019s New York in 1987 fetched a world-record for an individual painting of any kind\u2013$53.9 million.<\/p>\n

\u2022On May 2, 1951, she bought Woman in the Garden of Monsieur Forest<\/em>, painted in 1889 by Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec (1864-1901), from Hector Brame of Paris for $42,000. According to records at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which features The Joan Whitney Payson bequest, Brame had acquired it from the estate of Eug\u00e9ne-Guillaume Boch of Paris, who\u2019d bought it directly \u201cfrom the artist.\u201d Today, her investment is worth roughly $3-5 million, based on comparable Toulouse-Lautrec works recently sold at auction at Sotheby\u2019s London.<\/p>\n

\u2022After 40 minutes on the telephone, from her home on East 87th Street in New York, Madelaine Messmore-Netter pauses and says, \u201cThere\u2019s a wonderful [1952] story about Picasso\u2019s Au Lapin Agile<\/em> [a self-portrait of the artist in harlequin costume, standing for an absinthe at the bar for which the painting, created in 1905, is named]. The family probably wouldn\u2019t tell you about this.<\/p>\n

\u201cJohn and Lucinda Payson had a brother who died in uniform in France in World War II. After the war, my grandparents invited Joanie and Charlie [Payson] to see them where they were staying\u2013they were great friends\u2013on the top of a huge hill in the medieval village of Eze, in southern France.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy grandfather had Au Lapin Agile<\/em> with him at the time and felt, \u2018This would be a wonderful painting for Joanie.\u2019 They planned a party at the top of the hill, but then decided the hill would be too hard a climb for Joan, so they wrapped it up in brown butcher paper and set up the dinner party in a bistro at the bottom of the hill. He had a great time putting the painting on the wall before Joan arrived. Here they were at the party, and when she looked up and saw it, she said, \u2018Oh, you can\u2019t do this! I can\u2019t buy another painting right now.\u2019 Even wealthy people felt they didn\u2019t have any money after the war\u2013everybody was being careful. \u00a0So my grandparents wrapped it up and took it home.<\/p>\n

\u201cLater, they received a cable from Joan: \u2018Don\u2019t you dare sell that to anyone else. It\u2019s the only thing [we saw during the trip] that reminds me of my son.\u2019 She bought it as a memori morti<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

The painting\u2019s most recent auction price was for $40.7 million on November 15 in 1989.<\/p>\n

\u2022In 1952, from Millicent Rogers of Taos, New Mexico, she bought Peonies<\/em> by Manet. Today, this desert flower is worth, \u201cI presume, over $10 million,\u201d says Mark Winter of Art Experts, Inc., of Daytona Beach, Florida.<\/p>\n

\u2022In 1963, she acquired Bathers<\/em> by Paul C\u00e9zanne (1839-1906) from her confidential dealer Carman Messmore, New York, and De Hauke, New York. The second owners had been Charles and Olga Loesler of Florence, Italy, who\u2019d purchased the 1875 masterpiece from Ambroise Vollard, Paris, \u201cby exchange with three other C\u00e9zannes for cash and \u2018un tableau de Lautrec de chez Boussod (femme \u00e0 la toilette),\u2019 January 25, 1897.\u201d<\/p>\n

And on and on. Like Albert Barnes\u2019s hoard, Joan\u2019s private collection remained clouded in obscurity until\u2013just like Barnes\u2013all of a sudden, post-Starbucks, it\u2019s starting to become something terribly important<\/em> that she had the vivacious \u201ceye\u201d to acquire works by the likes of Monet, Matisse, Renoir, Prendergast, C\u00e9zanne, Daumier, Henri Rousseau, Manet, Sisley, and on and on (\u201cShe also supported artists in the Ash Can School,\u201d Haslett says), many of which have become the core of the European collection at the Met.<\/p>\n

Do you know what else can be found among the Joan Whitney Payson masterpieces at the Met? Pierce Brosnan. Check it out. In the feature film The Thomas Crown<\/em> Affair<\/em>, he\u2019s sitting in the European Art Wing of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, dreaming of his next heist while drooling over artworks that are part of Joan\u2019s Impressionist bequest.<\/p>\n

Later, in the dark, he steals them in white gloves, a pretty larceny that speaks to many of our private fantasies.<\/p>\n

Meanwhile, like pieces of a shimmering comet, Joan\u2019s collection is still breaking up and being sold at auction as awareness of her exquisite taste grows.<\/p>\n

Consider Sotheby\u2019s characterization, in October 2007, of her beloved 1945 acquisition Te Poipoi (The Morning)<\/em>, 1892, by Paul Gauguin (gavel price on November 7, 2007, was $39 million): \u201c[This is] one of the greatest Tahitian scenes by the artist remaining in private hands [and] part of one of the most illustrious collections ever formed in America\u2013that of Joan Whitney Payson.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cThere should be a book about this!\u201d curator Haslett exclaims while fielding questions about the devastating sparkle in Joan\u2019s collecting eye.<\/p>\n

So how do we compare Joan Whitney Payson with Albert C. Barnes? \u201cShe was famous for being fun,\u201d says Madelaine Messmore-Netter. \u201cBarnes was famous for not <\/em>being fun. At her home in Manhasset, her kids ran around Irises<\/em> and she was just lucky they didn\u2019t shoot it full of arrows playing cowboys and Indians. I mean, she was a mother<\/em>. She lived<\/em> with<\/em> the art. Barnes lived for<\/em> the art.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like they said about Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire, \u201cShe did everything he did, except backwards and on heels.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Joan Whitney Payson<\/strong>
\n ><\/strong> What could be more \u2018eccentric\u2019 in the old-boy rewards system than to be a woman? Recalling the occasions she did exercise her power, the New York Times<\/em> has said she showed \u201cno trace of shame about the way she threw around her half of the nation\u2019s third-largest private fortune.\u201d ><\/strong> 23 paintings as part of the Joan Whitney \u2028Payson bequest at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. ><\/strong> Dismissed and disproportionately reduced by history as \u201cthe woman who owned the New York Mets.\u201d While her brother, U.S. Ambassador to England John Hay \u201cJock\u201d Whitney\u2013publisher of the New York Herald Tribune<\/em> and chairman of Selznick International [Pictures], Inc.\u2013earned worldwide acclaim as a collector, she kept her paintings in a private setting\u2013in the comparative dark\u2013and was dismissed as a \u201cmom\u201d or hobbyist lady who bred Kentucky-Derby-winning horses (Twenty Grand in 1931, Shut Out in 1942). Why has time made her so shadowy? For instance, did you know that she and Jock financed the Hollywood epic Gone With the Wind<\/em>? That she produced New York theater performances? ><\/strong> Ahead of her time in collecting Impressionist and Post-Impressionist objects of desire which others would fight over after her death.><\/strong> No auctioned painting of Barnes has ever topped the $53.9 million earned by Irises<\/em> at \u2028Sotheby\u2019s in 1987. ><\/strong> Stingy negotiator who never blinked at a risk. Dared to buy only paintings she loved. > <\/strong>Kept Irises<\/em> above the fireplace at her place in New York; kept a fabulous collection at Manhasset which she reportedly never insured\u2013no alarm system. ><\/strong> Died: Stroke, 1975. Buried in Falmouth Foreside. ><\/strong> Movie: The Thomas Crown Affair<\/em> (1999), where her collection stars.<\/td>\n		Albert C. Barnes<\/strong>
\n ><\/strong> Dismissed and snubbed by the Philadelphia art establishment as an eccentric curmudgeon who earned his fortune by inventing Argyrol, the silver-nitrate-based treatment for gonorrhea. How could you step around that during a dinner party for museum benefactors? ><\/strong> Ahead of his time, putting together a $25 billion art collection of edgy, modernist brushmen like Matisse, Picasso, and C\u00e9zanne before those \u2018furriners\u2019 received international acceptance. He even paid Henri Matisse to cross the Atlantic to paint a 42-foot mural for him in his woodsy 12-acre villa\/gallery\/arboretum in Merion, Pennsylvania, vowing that the snooty Philadelphia museums who\u2019d turned up their noses at him would never get their hands on his daring collection, even after death. To seal the deal, he released his Barnes Foundation, which includes his house, gallery, and paintings, to the benefit and control of Lincoln University, a prestigious African-American college which counts among its presidents the father of famous civil-rights activist Julian Bond. \u2028 Enter a crack team of Philadelphia lawyers trying to crack the will open to redirect his paintings to a new Philadelphia museum spawned by the very museums he must have abhorred\u2026 > <\/strong>Stingy negotiator who never blinked at a risk. Dared to buy paintings he loved and to prove the efficacy of his self-taught art expertise. ><\/strong> Didn\u2019t get the credit he deserved during his lifetime. ><\/strong> Died: Car crash in 1951. \u201cNobody knows where he\u2019s buried,\u201d says Andrew Stewart of the Barnes Foundation. ><\/strong> Movie: The Art of the Steal<\/em> (2009), where his collection stars.<\/td>\n<\/tr>\n<\/tbody>\n<\/table>\n

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