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Oral History Interview with John Wilmerding, 2018 March 19-20

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Oral History Interview with John Wilmerding, 2018 March 19-20 Oral history interview with John Wilmerding, 2018 March 19-20 Contact Information Reference Department Archives of American Art Smithsonian Institution Washington. D.C. 20560 www.aaa.si.edu/askus Transcript Preface The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with John Wilmerding on 2018 March 19- 20. The interview took place at Wilmerding's home in New York. NY, and was conducted by Christopher Lyon for the Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution. John Wilmerding and Christopher Lyon have reviewed the transcript. Their corrections and emendations appear below in brackets with initials. This transcript has been lightly edited for readability by the Archives of American Art. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose. Interview CHRISTOPHER LYON: This is Christopher Lyon speaking. I am privileged to be interviewing John Wilmerding for the Archives of American Art, at his home in New York City, on March 19, 2018. I would like to briefly rehearse your accomplishments, and what I take to be your overall project as a scholar, for lack of a better word, so that you might agree or disagree and send me in a better direction. I was so struck that your career has this symmetrical quality, that it— JOHN WILMERDING: [Laughs.] I'm struck by it, too. [They laugh.] JOHN WILMERDING: Well, you know, it's amusing. I spent 11 years at Dartmouth, and then I went to the National Gallery, and that turned out to be 11 years. So when I was interviewed by Princeton, I said to them, "I seem to be on an astrological cycle, and I can't guarantee you more than 11 years." It turned out to be 25, but I was well aware of that— CHRISTOPHER LYON: [Laughs.] And your career begins with witnessing the creation of a major regional museum by a visionary woman collector, and it ends with you participating in the creation of a major museum with a visionary woman collector. I mean, it's so— JOHN WILMERDING: That was totally, of course, unintentional. But again, felicitous. Fortuitous. CHRISTOPHER LYON: And in between, as you say, there's an almost ballistic trajectory to your career. You moved quickly. JOHN WILMERDING: I wonder why you say ballistic. CHRISTOPHER LYON: [Laughs.] JOHN WILMERDING: I thought you were implying it was uphill, and now it's been downhill for the last half. [They laugh.] CHRISTOPHER LYON: I didn't want that to be the implication. But what does strike me is how unwaveringly direct it is. I would like to talk about that, if it makes sense to you, and your perception of where you were going. [00:02:02] JOHN WILMERDING: Sure. CHRISTOPHER LYON: In the course of your career, you became a leading authority on American art, a field you helped define. You assembled an important collection, taught at several of our most prestigious universities and colleges, and served for a decade—more than a decade, as you say—in our capital as a curator and administrator at our national museum. This is quite an arc of accomplishment. So here's the part where description starts to turn into interpretation a little bit. It seems to me—and I would like you to address this if you would—that in your writings, your collecting, your organizing of exhibitions, you aimed to tell a story of the rise of American art, the rise of American art as an expression of American identity, and that this has been an overarching project of a kind in your career. So I just wonder what you think about that, and whether, as you look back on what you've accomplished, this makes sense as a— JOHN WILMERDING: Yes, I don't know how intentional that was at the outset. I guess I have an orderly mind, and once focused on something, pursue it. So yes, [laughs] there is—in loose terms—there is a doggedness here that you've described. But it also is a factor of—in many instances, particularly in the early years—of accident and opportunity. [00:03:45] Because, to go back to the start, I was brought up, obviously, in a collecting family. I was aware of that as a fact, but not in any way as an influence. My mother certainly talked about the Havemeyer Collection. Her grandparents—and growing up in Long Island, we were in close proximity. But the great irony was that—my guess is that she was aware of her grandmother being a very strong, powerful, matriarchal force on her children, which included my grandmother, Electra Webb, who later founded the Shelburne Museum. And in a radical way, she herself, by taking up an interest in American folk art, was turning away from the traditions—of Old Master and of Impressionist painting—of her mother. There's a famous line in the family history, of my grandmother—I think at the age of nine or twelve, or as a child —coming home from the market with a small cigar-store Indian under her arm and a quilt, and her mother, Mrs. Havemeyer, saying to her, "Electra, how could you, brought up with Rembrandts and Monets and Degas, want to collect this American trash?" So, I was aware of that story, and in a sense of children and parents. My grandmother was equally a very strong, forceful personality. Had wonderful warmth, but even growing up, we grandchildren knew what a power she was. So seeing, as I said, the growth and the creation of her museum, had some kind of subliminal stamp. [00:05:59] But my point through all of this is: I had no knowledge of art, per se, or of art history, or even patterns of collecting, except, as I say, this was a given fact. Bringing it down to my mother's generation, while she was a person of great taste—she did some collecting herself, but I think was also very much aware of a very strong mother. They were close, but nonetheless, the consequence, I believe, of that was that my sister and I—my sister is two years younger than I—were growing up, my mother—I don't know whether intentionally or not; doesn't matter—basically never urged us or took us into New York. I, never having known about the Havemeyer Collection at the Met, never crossed the door, the threshold, of the Metropolitan Museum as a youth. My mother had been forced, obviously, to see the collection, to grow up with it. Had obviously gone to the Metropolitan Opera, done all the cultural things in New York. But here we were, 20 miles away. So my entire childhood, we had no exposure, except when we went into my grandparents' apartment on Park Avenue for holidays and I saw paintings on the wall. But to me, they were like anybody's decorations. To be sure, pretty important, but I had no sense of what they were, what they meant. [00:07:52] In those days, both through day school—and then I went off to boarding school in my teens—but for the most part, American high schools and boarding schools, again, had no training or offerings in what we now call art history, or even art appreciation. Many schools obviously had crafts courses and so forth. So again, from childhood really until I was 18 or 19, I had no idea what all of this really was, as I say, to realize that I was part of a collecting family. That all came later, when everything clicked. It's, again, to me, a great irony. This career is filled with ironies. This is the first major one, that I end up so committed to this field, and, as you say, with such a sense of trajectory. But it came out of a kind of vacuum. Just to finish the point, I think it was, as I say, my mother's own reaction to her parents and Shelburne and so forth. My father wisely chose not to live in Vermont in the family orbit. So we had both a physical distance, but in a sense, an emotional distance as well. That combined with the state of American education, however you defined the humanities in those days. So as a result, at boarding school, I was solidly trained in literature. I think it's where I first developed my love of writing, and certainly of reading, and was at least introduced to classics of American literature. Somehow—again, instinctively, I guess—I was drawn more to American literature than to continental or French, English literature. I mean, we read all kinds of things, but I think that was my first stirrings of interest in American fiction, maybe American history, et cetera. [00:10:18] So that by the time I hit college, with no awareness, from a familial point of view or an educational point of view, of the arts—because, as I say, we weren't taken to Carnegie, we were taken nowhere. Almost never came into New York for those kinds of things, particularly the family heritage sitting there at the Met. I get to college in freshman year. You have to take survey courses. You have to fulfill distributions. One of the major humanities courses that had a major reputation, as in the case of a number of universities, was the introductory art history survey. I think I took it for all the wrong reasons. It was where you were told you could meet the Radcliffe girls, where you also would be looked at by the upper Harvard classmen to be cultivated for the club system.
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