Art of a Jewish Woman (24 page)

Her first purchases were from faculty artists. Soon she was traveling several times a year to New York, the city that had taken Paris’ place as the art capital of the world for the first time in American history. The city’s expressionist “action” painters like Pollock, and the abstract artists like Barnett Newman, who favored intellectualism and control (The New York School), had dethroned the School of Paris and its stars, Gauguin, Rouault and Miro.

Now in her 40s, she was also discovering the Paris she could only have dreamt about as a poor student in France in the 1930s, dependent for money on waitressing and her boyfriend’s kindness after her father’s business was confiscated. She had close friends there, Violette and Andre Germain, whom Edward had invited home to dinner when Andre, a surgeon, and Violette, an anesthesiologist, were in St. Louis for some months pursuing fellowships in their fields at the medical center.

It was a friendship that went way beyond cordiality in its deep meaning to both families. Violette, a Catherine Deneuve look alike, came from an aristocratic French Catholic family, and her bond to Felice undid the sorrow she felt for the French complicity in the deportation of Jews to concentration camps during the war. For Felice, the friendship welcomed her into the core of the sophisticated culture she had only seen through plate glass display windows twenty-five years earlier. It was a society that had redeemed itself by once again championing
Liberté, Egalité, et Fraternite,
the one she would have gladly settled into after she had finished university except for the quirk of fate of her boyfriend’s illness that led her to migrate to Palestine. That same quirk of fate that may have saved her life, for after the war her school friend Pierre Mendelson was presumed deported to a concentration camp and dead, and the Jewish dean of the Nancy dental school, Armand Rosenthal, was shot by the Nazis, a fact now recorded in the university website.

Whenever she arrived in Paris, there was a room ready for her in the Germain’s 1 rue Alberic Magnard apartment in the 16th arrondissement. It occupied the whole top floor of the building and was a few steps from the Bois de Bologne. Andre and Edward bonded through medicine and the fact that they had both been raised in poor families. Andre’s mother, a cleaning lady, had raised him alone. Dinner conversations, with guests selected to provide a range of political persuasions, regularly turned to politics, with Felice championing the French communists and socialists. She remained true to her father’s dream and her youthful beliefs, nurtured in Wilno, of a progressive world order that valued a nurturing universal family over cutthroat competition and nationalism.

Stalin’s atrocities in Russia had not yet become known. Further, here as in other leftist salons it was important not to think too deeply about the inequalities between the guests at the table and the cook that was preparing the meal, the maid that was serving it, their tiny apartments and the Germain’s expansive one, not to mention their weekend home in Normandy. It was important not to think too deeply when the guests talked about their impending vacations to foreign countries that were so exotic because most of the people who lived there were too poor to have electricity and cars.

In this era of her life, Felice had her long hair restyled at Alexandre de Paris into the classic Audrey Hepburn short haircut. Her figure was comely. She had her own dressmaker, who tailored for her trim black suits short at the knee or skirts, blouses, and serapes patterned with folk art designs. Her haberdasher in New York found her exotic earrings, necklaces and colorful shawls. She had her regular room across the street from the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA) in the Dorset Hotel on 53rd Street, far enough away from the elevator and light shafts so she wouldn’t be disturbed by the rush of noise or wind, a bed with synthetic pillows instead of down to prevent sneezing, and a window she could open easily for fresh air.

“The Dorset was my home, and the MOMA was my temple. That’s where I came to worship,” she said. She also regularly visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Primitive Art, and the Guggenheim. When my brother met and married a girl from New York City, Felice and Edward held the pre-wedding dinner in the walnut-paneled dining room of the Dorset.

Felice’s story of how she made her arrival into the New York private gallery scene and her first major purchase sounded like an adventure fraught with extemporization and boldness when she told it to me. It was somewhat like her crossing into Palestine, her passage through Ellis Island, and her first years in America. The tale goes something like this: She was in New York alone. In fact, most of her trips to New York and Paris were independent. Edward would join her perhaps for two or three days, then she would spend a week or two by herself. One day in 1951, she was walking on a block near the MOMA when a downpour caught her. She sheltered under the nearest awning, which happened to be the entry to the Sidney Janis Gallery, the preeminent gallery for abstract expressionist paintings. She ascended the flight of steps to the second floor and glimpsed clean, white well-lit rooms.

She peered through the glass, and the rooms looked like the insides of cubes that stretched toward the rear, radiating color from the big canvases on the walls. “I was curious, so I walked in. Sidney got up from his desk at the rear and made me welcome, then went back to his desk. The paintings were exciting, alive, not like still-lifes, which were just pieces of fruit. I wanted to know the man who could do such works,” Felice said.

She came back the next day, looked some more, and told Sidney she wanted to buy a Pollock. It was about three feet high and five feet long, teeming with mostly green and black tangles and white lacunae. “Jackson Pollock was the greatest living painter at that time, but I never felt intimidated. Sidney had never before met a young woman coming in by herself to buy a painting, but it was easy for me. If anything, he should have felt intimidated by me, because I scrutinized everything. It felt as natural as the day I was born. I only felt I liked the painting and wanted to have one.”

Sidney Janis, long a noted collector and on the Advisory Board of the Museum of Modern Art, had opened his gallery in 1948. He exhibited important modern European artists such as Mondrian, Miro, and Klee side-by-side with emerging American abstract expressionists. According to the most influential art critic of the time, Clement Greenberg, Janis’ decision to bring the abstract expressionists to prominence “not only implied, it declared, that Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Phillip Guston, Mark Rothko and Robert Motherwell were to be judged by the same standards as Matisse and Picasso, without condescension, without making allowances … the real issue was whether ambitious artists could live in this country by painting what they did ambitiously. Sidney Janis helped as much as anyone to see that it was decided affirmatively.”
²⁵

According to Felice, Sidney Janis was the man who convinced Alfred Barr, the founding director of the Museum of Modern Art, to bring the abstract expressionist “action painters” into the pantheon. “When I told him I wanted to buy the Pollock, he asked what my husband thought, undoubtedly trying to find out if I had a husband with money, or even a husband, and was not just a poor single woman from the Midwest. I told him that my husband would undoubtedly want to see the painting himself and insisted on a three-day approval sale. He agreed to send the painting to St. Louis for three days, and if Edward didn’t like it we could return it. Edward did like it. He said, ‘I respect your taste.’

“Edward began to enjoy going with me to the galleries and we became friends with Sidney and Hansi. In no time Edward knew everything, he was so bright. Sidney Janis said, ‘In the years I have been dealing with art and with all the customers, I have never met a man like Dr. Massie. At first he knew nothing, but if you said you wanted a painting, he said we would buy it. He was the first man who came with that attitude, rather than with the attitude of trying to see how much money he could make from art. Most of the time the men are the aggressors and do it to make money. But after a year or two Dr. Massie knew how to look at a painting and how to like it or criticize it. If he didn’t like it he would say no’.”

“Ah, Sidney and Hansi and their sons,” Felice mused. “That was the most interesting time of our life—a simple married couple from St. Louis, can you imagine? Hansi was Harriet, Sidney’s wife, and we always talked about the art and The Movement. Hansi was kind and warm, Sidney was more respectful. He was a peculiar, brilliant man, very dry, severe but scrupulous. He wouldn’t give you a penny, but he wouldn’t take from you either. He was a very honest man for the field of art dealers and galleries.”

Hansi introduced Felice and Edward to her brother Donald Grossman and his wife Isabel. They lived in an expansive, all-white apartment on Central Park West given over to large abstract expressionist paintings. But what cemented their friendship, Felice said, was that Isabel had been raised in Warsaw and had come to America just before the war. They felt in each other the link to Eastern Europe, the tragedy of their lost world and family members, and the excitement of their new world.

“After a while, when Isabel wanted to buy a painting for herself, Donald wouldn’t let her until I saw the painting first and approved. I felt so flattered.”

Isabel and Donald occasionally visited St. Louis to see Felice’s collection, and in turn Felice often, and Edward occasionally, visited the Grossmans’ apartment. At night the softly lit paintings glowed around them. Outside in the foreground, Central Park was a black abyss, and beyond it the lights of the New York skyscrapers bobbed in the currents of air and the automobile lights made red, white, and gold traceries that rivaled the artists’ accomplishments. The art and the setting took them outside of themselves so that there was nothing to do but contemplate and share a reverie. In an ethereal place, they felt that beauty was saving the world and banishing evil.

Contemplating the paintings, Felice quoted the poet John Keats’ lines in
Ode to a Grecian Urn
, “…thou, silent form dost tease us out of thought,” and
Ode to a Nightingale
, “Fade far away, dissolve, and quite forget the weariness, the fever, and the fret.”

In that most fulfilling time of her life, Barnett Newman was the one great artist of the period with whom Felice became a good personal friend. She first made his acquaintance at a 1962 exhibit he shared with Willem de Kooning at the Allan Stone Gallery. Like all the New York abstract expressionists whose works she collected, he was her contemporary, born in 1905, five years before her. A eulogy to him in
Vogue
magazine after he died in 1970 described him as “the great painter and sculptor whose work and life did much to influence the art of this century … a towering figure of 20th-century art [who] was a major force in the emergence of the New York School after the Second World War.”
²⁶

Newman and Felice each had a distinctive look. Felice’s was her Audrey Hepburn haircut, hair that stayed black naturally her whole life, artful mascara and red lipstick, and folk-art adornments that she alternated with her black suits and jackets. Newman’s was his jaunty hats, large gray mustache, cigarette dripping ash, and monocle for peering closely at things. They each had two strong personality characteristics in common, which may explain how they became friends: They both loved ideas, and they both loved to talk and laugh in a cascade of words with an extraordinary mastery of vocabulary. They bubbled together. Most artists preferred to let their creations do the talking, and Felice in fact often supplied them with words and interpretations.

About this bubbling imagination and conversation, Czeslaw Milosz, the Lithuanian-Polish poet, essayist, and Felice’s contemporary in Wilno, had some thoughts: “Eastern European intellectual avidity, fervor in discussion, sense of irony, freshness of feeling, and spatial geographic fantasy--derive from a basic weakness. [The Eastern European] always remains an adolescent governed by a sudden ebb or flow of inner chaos. In contrast to form, which is achieved in stable societies.”
²⁷

In addition to being an artist, Newman was a philosopher, writer, baseball fan, raconteur, and politician (in his youth he ran against Fiorello LaGuardia for mayor of New York on a plank to improve the city’s education and aesthetics). Felice describes the two of them, along with his wife Annelie, lost in long exchanges of ideas and debates over art. Though born in New York City, Newman shared with Felice the close kinship of their Polish village roots. Felice had one of his vertical-striped works, a slightly trembling narrow strip of black on a white background, given to her as a gift by Barnett’s widow Annelie after his death in 1970.

She kept the Newman with her for the rest of her life, unlike some other paintings that she later sold or donated to museums. She said that Newman earlier had offered her another painting as a gift, but she couldn’t connect with it. She gave it back to him. “It would have been dishonest to accept a piece of work I didn’t truly love; that would have been cupidity. After his death, Annalie came to me and said Barnett wanted me to have one of his vertical stripe creations. It was beautiful, simple and alive, and it was an honor to be remembered by him. I accepted it immediately.”

“I never did anything for money. I had days when I couldn’t eat more than once, and I still never did anything for money. I just wanted to eat enough to live and then do what I wanted to do. We bought the Pollock for $2,000 or $3,000 and the first DeKooning for about $8,000.”

Besides her museum and gallery visits and innate response to the art, Felice was reading voluminously, subscribing to several art and architecture magazines, and amassing a wall in the home library of modern art books. Then in no time, to her surprise Washington University and the St. Louis Art Museum asked her to lecture, especially whenever they had a new modern acquisition. “I asked Edward why. I’d never gone to school to study art and had no degree.”