Kirk Varnedoe (Kv)

THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART ORAL HISTORY PROGRAM INTERVIEW WITH: KIRK VARNEDOE (KV) INTERVIEWER: SHARON ZANE (SZ) LOCATION: THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART DATE: 28 NOVEMBER 2001 BEGIN TAPE 1, SIDE 1 SZ: I'll start the way I always do, and ask you to tell me where and when you were born, and something about your family background. KV: I was born in Savannah, Georgia, January 18, 1946. I was the youngest of four children, by a good stretch. My two brothers and my sister were six, seven and eight years older than I was, so I was the baby of the family, by a long shot. My parents had both grown up, more or less, in Savannah, although my father wasn't born there. He was an investment banker who had started his own firm in the depths of the Depression, which was an odd thing to do, but he still, when I was growing up, was running it with a partner, as a private investment firm. SZ: Did you say he was not from Savannah? KV: He was born in Tampa, actually. SZ: Well, he was southern, anyway. KV: Yes, he was southern. Definitely. Southern, and with strong Scottish ties; very proud of his Scottish heritage. He was president of the St. Andrew's Society. I grew up with small kilts, piping in front of the haggis -- that sort of thing. MoMA Archives Oral History: K. Varnedoe page 1 of 180 SZ: Golf? KV: He was a very big golfer. He took us to Glen Eagles and St. Andrew's when I was a child, too. SZ: But Varnedoe is not -- KV: Varnedoe is actually a French name. There still exist people in France with the original spelling, which is V-e-r-n-a-d-e-a-u -- Vernadeau. The French always think it's Flemish or something, because of the "V‖, but it was a French Huguenot family, in essence, that got out when the Huguenots got out, then mixed in with Scottish blood and came to the U.S., I think in the 18th century. SZ: So, strong Scottish ties, and you were about to say something about your mother. KV: My mother was the daughter of a prominent Savannah doctor, John Kirk Train, for whom I'm named -- I'm John Kirk Train Varnedoe. He had married a woman named Lilla Kolmer, who was very, very wealthy. The Kolmer family went back into Alabama and Georgia. I'm not sure where the money came from, but they had a good deal of it so they lived in a style beyond a doctor's salary. They had a great, big brick house, et cetera. See, [my parent‘s families] were [of] two very different styles. In my mother's family, she was the oldest of six children. All the boys went to Yale, all the girls went to Smith, and they were a very northern-oriented, cosmopolitan family in the sense that, certainly, in Savannah, in those days, they were well traveled. They frequently went to England, especially (they were tremendous Anglophiles), and my grandfather also was a great Scotsman and a member of the St. Andrew's Society. They thought of themselves as having a lot of ties to England, particularly to Scotland. They traveled a lot, and they partied very heavily. My brother often says the difference is that that family drove Cadillacs, and my father's family drove Chevrolets. MoMA Archives Oral History: K. Varnedoe page 2 of 180 In my father's family, my father's biological father died when he was a very few months old, and his mother wound up falling in love with her first cousin, which was thought to be a very bad thing and they tried to stave this marriage off. So, actually, my grandmother and my father came to New York for a brief period, when he was a very young child, because they were trying to keep her away from -- But it couldn't be kept away, and she did eventually marry her first cousin, Gorden Saussy, which is another originally French name -- Saussaie. Anyway, they never had any other children; my father was the only child. But Judge Saussy, Gordon Saussy, who became his father and the only father he ever knew, had been mayor of Savannah; had coached football at Georgia; was a very distinguished man in his own right. But they were very, very different kinds of families. I think my father's family was much more conservative southern, just an entirely different outlook on life, as opposed to the sort of free-wheeling, free-drinking family that my mother's family was, and more obviously wealthy. So it was a very odd childhood, to be split between the Saussy legacy and the Train legacy. SZ: And Savannah, at that time (I guess this is the '50s, into the early '60s), was provincial? Not exactly? KV: Well, you never know that as a child, of course. It's the only world you know. It was a port, so ships came in. You didn't have the feeling it was totally rural or isolated from the outside world. Like New Orleans, it has a certain kind of raffishness and a certain kind of elegance that goes with being a port city. And, of course, it has this fabulous natural beauty because of the town plan, Oglethorpe's town plan. It always felt like a special place. It didn't feel like some hick town somewhere. There was always the feeling in Savannah that Atlanta was this sort of parvenu railroad town, where Savannah was the seat of culture; that Savannah passed for what was more artistic in the context of the state of Georgia. MoMA Archives Oral History: K. Varnedoe page 3 of 180 It was a very privileged childhood, because my parents were relatively well-to-do. We belonged to the golf club and the yacht club and all those sort of things, and the network of marsh water -- you know, the tidal delta between Savannah and Savannah Beach -- provides an enormous amount of inland tidal water. Once you can get a boat, when you're ten or eleven or whatever, you're Huck Finn, Robinson Crusoe or whatever, with all these Barrier Islands that are around you. You have an enormous amount of freedom. There's a great deal of natural beauty. My mother had done a master's degree in creative writing at Smith. She wrote poetry, and she was very interested in the theatre. She used to come to New York all the time, and bring us, as children, up to New York. SZ: She got her undergraduate, too? KV: Yes. She had wanted to be a teacher, but her mother wouldn't let her, during the Depression. She said other people needed the jobs more. So she wound up being the first woman on the board of education in Savannah, the first woman president of the board of education of Savannah. She was a very active person in education in Savannah, one of the first people to be involved in integrationist groups in Savannah, as well. She was sort of a progressive, liberal force in the city. SZ: In contrast to your father, I guess. KV: My father was a much more conservative southerner. SZ: He'd been educated in the north? KV: He'd gone to the University of Georgia. He was not a stupid man. He was a very intelligent stockbroker and a very well respected man in the city, but he had traditionalist, patriarchal views. One of the points of my education, in a certain sense, was to watch the two styles. My mother was a liberal, a progressivist, an integrationist, et cetera, and a perfect tyrant to our servants. We always had servants. Everybody in Savannah was very cheap. We always had several black MoMA Archives Oral History: K. Varnedoe page 4 of 180 servants, and she was an incredible tyrant and very, very harsh on them. Whereas my father -- who at one point voted for George Wallace and was a dyed-in-the-wool segregationist, I think -- was extremely, in the old southern tradition of patriarchy, extremely supportive, gentle and generous to all the people who worked for him -- sharecroppers who worked there. We had a pine plantation north of Savannah that my grandfather used largely for hunting that we inherited. We kept a sharecropper up there, and many other people. My father inherited a cab company from my grandfather, as well, that he ran, and all the people who worked for him, white or black, were treated with a very gentle hand, very loving and kind. That was always an interesting difference, between the idea and practice, you know. SZ: So you were the youngest, by how many years? KV: I'm six years younger than my sister [Comer Varnedoe], then the two brothers [Samuel and Gordon Varnedoe] go bang, bang. [Everyone] went off to boarding school, and I was raised like an only child, in a certain sense. They all complained that they had taken the hard knocks and I got the soft years. My parents had given up trying to be disciplinarians by the time I came around. Also, they had established themselves. My father's business was more established or whatever, so my brothers and sisters always felt I got a cushier ride than they did. SZ: You stayed and went to school there until what age? Did you go to boarding school? KV: I was in public school up until the coincidence, somewhere around 1953, of Brown v.

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