torpedoes in time

mark dellas

“Time forks perpetually toward innumerable futures,” Borges wrote. In one of them, the hundredth anniversary of the Museum of Modern Art, set for November 7, 1929, happens not in Manhattan, but eight hours northwest, in Buffalo, New York.

This isn’t revisionist history. It’s a near-miss, a case of almost-was. What other consequences would have cascaded from a frontier MoMA belong to speculation–but it is possible to pinpoint the “forks.” An explosion in a shingle factory, the exile of an aristocrat, and the influence of four visionary women directly led to the creation of two of the leading museums of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries–MoMA in Manhattan and the Buffalo AKG Art Museum in Buffalo–and would bind their fates forever.

The International Exhibition of Modern Art in February 1913 at the 69th Regiment Armory in New York City on Lexington Avenue between 25th and 26th Streets–later simply called the Armory Show–imported the latest European art, and the latest European art controversies, to America. Thousands of Americans, encountering Modern art for the first time, swiftly took up impassioned positions for and against.

On the side of the Moderns was one son of Buffalo, Anson Conger Goodyear. Born June 20, 1877 and raised in high Victorian style at 723 Delaware Avenue,¹ Conger was heir to a business and political dynasty that reached from Buffalo to Bogalusa to Washington, D.C.² He completed his undergraduate studies at Yale in 1899 and followed his father’s footsteps–first into the lumber and rail business, and then in 1912 succeeding him as director of the Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts, the parent organization of the Albright Art Gallery. Presumably, this responsibility and his own growing taste for the Modern art coming out of Europe drew him to New York for the fateful encounter the following year.

At the Armory Show the young Buffalo industrialist saw Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” and Constantin Brancusi’s “The Kiss.” The New York press memorably dismissed the former as “an explosion in a shingle factory.” But Goodyear was enchanted. He returned to the Queen City, and to his post at the head of the Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts, with limitless cash and a powerful itch.

“It’s a mockery.”

“I think you’re being a bit high-minded. Uncharacteristically, I might add.”

Frank Goodyear Jr.’s glance says everything. Across from him, E.B. Green Jr., son of the famous architect, blushes and lifts a tall, sweating glass. Ice avalanches to his waiting lips. He frowns, shakes the glass once, and sets it down beside the cards they’ve forgotten.

“It’s–”

“Whiskey highball, sir?”

“That’s right,” E.B. nods once to the man behind the bar at the back of the tiny room, which shimmers with cigarette smoke and heat from a cozy fireplace.

“Another for me, too, Louis,” Frank adds.

“But it isn’t a social club,” his partner presses on. “And it isn’t a bordello.”

“What about here? Would you hang it here? At the club?”

“No, no, listen–it’s a museum.”

“This is your father speaking.”

“This is your nephew we’re talking about.”

And here, at least, they can talk freely. Frank and E.B. Jr. sit at a small wooden table over an abandoned game of bridge. The exposed beams of the ceiling hang low, giving the room a conspiratorial feel. The walls are bare except for a single framed portrait of two rows of young men.

The house, 164 Elmwood Avenue, belongs to the first man, E.B. Jr. In three years he will sell it to the Pack Corporation, or, informally, the Pack Club, an exclusive fraternity that his companion, Frank Goodyear, recently helped to found. Already, in the early spring of 1926, it is transforming into a clubhouse.

Ever since Bill Donovan’s Prohibition raid on the Tudor-Style Saturn Club in 1923, the habitual drinkers among the Buffalo elite had to search for safer harbors. Frank Goodyear and a few friends rustled up a membership of fifty-two and capped participation there–at the number of playing cards in a standard deck.

The Pack Club’s founders’ grandfathers had formed the Saturn Club in 1885 as a relaxed and somewhat mischievous alternative to the Buffalo Club, established by their own fathers and grandfathers in the starchier times of 1867. Now in 1926 the great- and great-great-grandsons of Buffalo’s first formalized social elite are shaping a still more exclusive and still less conservative klatch, chiefly for the purpose of bridge playing and hard drinking without drawing attention.³

But liberal and conservative are slippery labels–always, but especially toward the end of the Roaring Twenties, between the wars, and especially in Buffalo, a rich city far from the influence of Atlantic tides.

“You’re being a Brodhead,” Frank quips.

“And you’re a bit tight.”

E.B.’s bright face betrays the truth: He’s the tighter of the two. He waits until Louis retreats behind the bar to snatch up his fresh whiskey highball.

“This Picasso’s terribly well known,” Frank says.

“I don’t particularly care,” E.B. says, taking pain to enunciate each syllable through the thickening rye. “Picasso … he’s a pornographer with … with no technique.”

“That’s rather an insupportable assertion, Ed. I don’t pretend to understand the new style but …”

“It’s–”

“It has character. It has … it has life in it, Ed.”

“Giving old Ansley a hard-on isn’t the sort of ‘life’ I think we should be bringing into the–”

E.B. cuts himself off. The room is small. A few heads have turned up from other card games at the mention of the esteemed reformer and art patron Ansley Wilcox, an avuncular eminence universally beloved.⁴

But the issue isn’t–strictly–the erections of septuagenarians. The issue is “La toilette,” a painting by Pablo Picasso, completed in 1906 and acquired two decades later by the Albright Art Gallery and its Fellows For Life Fund, at the direction of board member and Fund-founder Anson Conger Goodyear. Freshly post-Blue Period, the fleshy, earthy painting depicts a naked woman using both hands to tie (or untie) her hair, standing before a mirror in the arms of a handmaid, the latter’s face (androgynous and curiously suggestive of the artist’s own) inscrutable and staring past her mistress, as if beyond the left edge of the canvas.

The acquisition catalyzes the first great controversy among the gallery’s directors. They have put up with Conger Goodyear’s Modern tastes–and his generosity–so far. At first he focused on sculpture; and though E.B. Green, the architect of the Neoclassical Albright Art Gallery, had opinions on sculpture (he would convince John Albright to pay extra for caryatids commissioned from the Beaux-Arts master Augustus Saint-Gaudens to complete the temple) he and the other directors kept quiet while Conger emptied the center courtyard of its plaster casts of Grecco-Roman glories and replaced them with new works by Epstein, Despiau, Dobson, Bourdelle, Haller, Maillol, Poupelet, Rodin, Brancusi, Noguchi, and Lehmbruck.

Conger’s donations and acquisitions in the realm of painting were somewhat more contentious.

Between 1920 and 1964 Conger would acquire and donate to the Albright 361 works of art. These included Paul Gaugin’s “Spirit of the Dead Watching,” Giacomo Bella’s “Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash,” Salvador Dalí’s “The Transparent Simulacrum of the Feigned Image,” Camille Pissaro’s “Peasants in the Field, Eragny,” Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot’s “Italian Monk Reading,” a still life on paper from Roger de La Fresnaye’s, Honoré Daumier’s “Laundress on the Quai d’Anjou,” Vincent Van Gogh’s “The Old Mill,” Fernand Léger’s “The Village in the Forest,” and comparable works by Tolouse-Lautrec, Degas, Picasso, Cassatt, Klee, Renoir, Gris, Modigliani, Matisse, and Valandon.

But Picasso’s “La Toilette,” in 1926, hits a tripwire. This year Conger has a nomination to serve as president of the board. Fearing an expansion of his campaign to Modernize the museum, longtime director E.B. Green Sr. makes every effort to scupper his candidacy. Green secures the support of other arch-conservatives on the board. He activates proxies, like his son. It is a war fought largely out of sight for most of the city–with pitched battles and quick sorties in the Buffalo Club, the Saturn Club, the Pack Club, and the private salons of the city’s millionaires–until finally it resolves in Conger’s defeat and ouster from the board.⁵

Verily I say unto you, No prophet is accepted in his own country. So Christ, in a moment of pique, remarked to his apostles. A. Conger Goodyear would have sympathized with the sentiment.

Defeated at silent ballot by the last of the Victorian Old Guard, Conger doesn’t intend to spend another year on a gallery board under E.B. Green’s conservative control. He takes himself–and his ideas, his collection, and his still plentiful reserves of cash–to New York City.

There he meets with Abigail Rockefeller, Lillie P. Bliss, and Mary Quinn Sullivan along with their friends Murray Crane and Paul Sachs. All share a taste for Modern art, and mutual friendships with some of the leading Modern artists. All understand that, at the time, the United States lacks any gallery dedicated to the collection of Modern art. And each one of them is richer than Croesus. Abby and the others know Conger had attempted to rectify this in Buffalo and had failed–had been ostracized. So they invite him to serve as the first president of the Museum of Modern Art–MoMA.

With Conger at the head of the board, the founders choose Alfred H. Barr to serve as the first director, a position he holds from 1929 to 1943. As the group refined the mission and vision of the new institution, Barr sketched out an “ideal permanent collection.” His drawing on a page of typewriter paper represents, he later wrote, “a torpedo moving through time.” At the left end of the page, representing the past, is the narrow tail of the torpedo, representing the collection of a small number of “European” and “non-European Prototypes and Sources.” The torpedo passes Goya, Delacroix, Daumier, then widens to accommodate the Impressionists, straightening out its flanks as it passes 1900. The rounded end, on Barr’s draft, is a hair past 1925, containing the “School of Paris,” “Rest of Europe,” “Mexicans,” and “Americans.” This is puzzlingly fuzzy for an acquisitions manifesto–but it constitutes a snapshot rather than a static manifesto. The nose of the torpedo, Barr explained, represents “the ever advancing present, its tail the ever-receding past of 50 to 100 years ago.” A radical proposition for a radical time, Barr, Goodyear, and the founders proposed a permanent practice of selling works more than fifty years old to fund the continuous purchase of work by living artists.

But purchasing anything would come much later. At first, MoMA relied on donations. As president of the board, Conger set the tone–and influenced the institution’s tastes. The majority of his acquisitions–hundreds of Modern works of sculpture, paintings, drawings, and prints–moved downstate to serve as the cornerstone of the new institution’s permanent collection. That didn’t only make MoMA possible–it also had profound implications for the direction of the gallery (and the city) that Goodyear left behind.

Time’s forking in 1913 has been the subject of countless articles and monographs. A second branching another thirteen years later was almost as consequential–at least for Modern and postmodern art in America.

This was the year Conger Goodyear founded the Albright Art Gallery’s Fellows For Life Fund, tapping a wellspring of cash for the unrestricted purchase of contemporary art.

This was the year Conger directed the gallery to purchase Pablo Picasso’s “La Toilette,” triggering an outcry and his ouster.

This was the year, in the depths of Prohibition, that a frontier town’s silk-stockinged Saturnalia moved from an established society club into a nondescript white house at 164 Elmwood Avenue, a discrete place to toast the end of the Victorian Age, debate the Modern, and foment social coups.

And this was the year that Seymour H. Knox II, eleven years Conger’s junior, heir to the Woolworth’s five-and-dime fortune and already a Vice President of the Marine Midland Bank, joined the Albright board–and, at Conger’s urging, the Fellows For Life Fund.

Down one path we might have found Buffalo, New York the acknowledged Mecca of the Modern. Think about it: Within fifty-two and a half square miles you might have seen Frank Lloyd Wright houses and office buildings, a perfectly preserved Pierce-Arrow showroom, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s childhood home, the towering grain silos that inspired the Bauhaus and the International Style–and, of course, the Museum of Modern Art.

But taking the other tine–the one we’re following now–instead we find MoMA in Manhattan and Seymour Knox in a helicopter somewhere over Paterson, New Jersey.

The relentless percussion of the chopper blades had faded over the Finger Lakes. The closer Seymour gets to New York, the easier it is to forget he’s in a metal bucket in the sky. Beside him Gordon Smith, the tall, square-jawed director of the Albright Art Museum, sits focused on the pages in his lap–flipping between a copy of Art in America and the latest New York Times, cross-referencing names and dates in each. They’ve flown this route so many times now, nearly every other weekend for a year. The silver spires of the city soar up ahead. Seymour feels as if he could touch them, pick them up like polo sticks and raise them high above his head.

Goodyear served as president of MoMA from 1929 to 1939, the year President Franklin Delano Roosevelt visited to make a stirring speech celebrating the institution’s first decade. He remained as a member of the board of trustees until his death in 1964. During all these decades supporting MoMA, Goodyear continued to send extraordinary gifts back to Buffalo, the city that had spurned him.

As Goodyear approached the end of a long and consequential life, his younger friend Seymour Knox, back in Buffalo, began to think about his own legacy. Since 1926 Knox had funneled millions to the Albright Art Gallery. But, approaching his own half-century, he hadn’t made a mark on the city–not the way Goodyear had in New York, starting a museum of his own, according to his own tastes.

The problem was: Knox didn’t know his own tastes.

In truth, there is disagreement on this point. The party line among the local art intelligentsia, echoed by Buffalo News critics and docents for decades, is that Seymour had exceptional taste in art, taste that was adventurous and ahead of his times.

But this didn’t become evident until Knox was almost fifty. For more than three decades he had carried out his charge at the Buffalo Academy of Fine Arts more like a lieutenant than a general, rarely opining on acquisitions.

Buffalo News critic Jean Reeves, quoted in Knox’s obit, leaves a clue: “His outlook was always youthful and adventurous, and he was unfailingly receptive to new ideas and techniques,” she remembered.

Receptivity was the key. For in 1955 Gordon Smith replaced Edgar Schenck as director of the Albright and brought a clear vision to revivify the museum with a mission to collect the art of its time–a mission that unmistakably mirrored the more famous MoMA’s, which the slighted Goodyear had helped to shape. To that end, he recruited the affable, pliable, and fabulously wealthy Knox to serve as president.

Knox was a businessman, a banker, a retail magnate sitting on a fortune from the Gilded Age, a squash enthusiast and a world-class polo player.⁶ But Smith guessed he had the potential to become one of the all-time great patrons of artists and the arts. No record reveals where the fledgling board member had lined up in the controversy over “La Toilette,” but, under Smith’s influence, Seymour would prove as simpatico to his own time as Conger had been to his.

In their frequent helicopter trips to New York City, Smith would guide Knox toward the newest artists of the emerging postmodern schools: DeKooning, Gorky, Pollock, Motherwell, Guston, before these names became famous.

To a significant degree, Smith and Knox made them famous: It was the Albright, not MoMA or the National Museum or any other regional gallery of note, that first collected and canonized these artists.

They had help from another expat aristocrat. Martha Kellog Jackson had left her home and her husband John Jackson in Buffalo and in 1953 opened a gallery in New York–first in a brownstone on at East 66th Street and then, after 1955, in a modern, a glass-fronted space on East 69th. Drawing on a considerable inheritance–her grandfather was Spencer Kellogg, a baron of Buffalo’s silo-dotted waterfront and founder of what was once the world’s largest linseed oil company–Jackson quickly made a name as a discerning dealer, and promoted dozens of upcoming artists from the U.S. and Europe. A former member of the Albright’s acquisitions advisory committee, she kept in touch, cut deals, and served as guide to Knox and Smith on their helicopter trips to the city.

These trips were remarkably fruitful. Smith would typically visit a gallery first, often at Jackson’s suggestion, and if a work passed muster, set up a private viewing for Knox. Consider these donations Knox made in a single day: Arshile Gorky’s “The Liver Is the Cock’s Comb,” 1944; Jackson Pollock’s “Convergence,” 1952; Franz Kline’s “New York, N.Y.,” 1953; Adolph Gottlieb’s “Frozen Sounds II,” 1952; Sam Francis’s “Blue-Black,” 1952; and Mark Rothko’s “Orange and Yellow,” 1956. Some of these came from auction houses, some from galleries, and some from the artists themselves. Knox’s purchases from Jackson’s gallery alone include works by Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, Helen Frankenthaler, Grace Hartigan, Hans Hofmann, Jasper Johns, Lee Krasner, Roy Lichtenstein, Marisol, Agnes Martin, Joan Mitchell, Robert Motherwell, Bridget Riley, David Smith, Clyfford Still, and Andy Warhol.

“Art should be acquired to be seen and enjoyed, not to be stored in a warehouse,” Knox once remarked. “There is no point in buying more for myself. Where would I put it?”

Happily, he had a gallery as his disposal. Following Jackson’s taste and connections and Smith’s tactful urging, Seymour became the leading proponent of the modernist and abstract expressionist movements. (The Knox-Smith-Jackson combo arguably played an even greater role than the CIA in cementing the global reputation–and value–of American abstract expressionist art and artists.) Knox aggressively acquired these works and donated them to the museum in Buffalo–so many that in 1962 it became the Albright-Knox.

By 1969 the Albright-Knox was home to the world’s largest and best collection of the art of the American 1960s.⁷ This was so widely recognized that artists who wanted to cement their reputations in that canon didn’t wait for Seymour to come with his checkbook–they donated their works, an investment in their legacy. Most notably, Clyfford Still donated a virtually unheard-of thirty-five pieces to the gallery–a significant number even against the grand total of 700 works that Knox would acquire and bequeath in his lifetime.

Gordon Smith and Martha Jackson may have shaped Knox’s tastes. But Knox shaped the times he lived in; his tastes became the tastes of the nation, and then the world.

And, to his credit, he did more than merely acquire works. He was also a friend and patron to numerous artists–even Andy Warhol would produce his portrait. And he brought those artists home, not merely as guests to show off at the Saturn Club or in private salons, but as teachers and ambassadors to the people of Buffalo.

In the summers Knox put on free festivals that brought the world’s most famous Modernists and most exciting new names. Marcel Duchamp, Jasper Johns, and Jackson Pollock all visited, gave talks, praised the many charms of the Queen City, and left their art behind. “The Festival of the Arts Today,” held in 1965 and 1968, brought together Gordon Smith’s Albright-Knox and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, then under Lukas Foss’s baton, into a dizzying collision: John Cage, Merce Cunningham, and Marcel Duchamp all performed, exhibited, and talked over the course of an action-packed six weeks.

Whether one knew it or not, to grow up in Buffalo in the 1960s and 70s meant to come of age at the swirling center of the world of postmodern art and artists.

In the postmodern movement, Knox’s model Conger Goodyear found the limits of the tastes he’d developed at the Armory Show: At the end of his life, Goodyear worried about “the charlatan under the Modern mantle” and wasted no time on the “drip and scribble schools.” Perhaps the times pass us all–even those of us who seem to have the biggest head-start.

The Buffalo Fine Arts Academy, founded in 1862, birthed the Albright Art Gallery, named for John Albright, who funded the original E.B. Green-designed building. In 1962 Seymour Knox II added his name to the building and paid for an expansion by the postmodernist architect Gordon Bunshaft. On September 23, 2016, the museum announced that Western New York-born hedge fund billionaire Jeffrey Gundlach would make a gift of $45 million to fund yet another expansion, this time by Shohei Shigematsu–creating the Buffalo AKG Art Museum.

MoMA has avoided the difficulty of appending surnames. But one name links both institutions: Goodyear. It was Goodyear’s aggressive pursuit of the Modern that led to his ouster from Buffalo; that ouster made possible New York’s MoMA while making room in Buffalo for the equally wealthy and arguably more impressionable Knox to come up behind him and champion the next cultural revolution. And the city that rejected the principles that came to undergird the Museum of Modern Art would eventually adopt them.

Today, as MoMA approaches its centenary and the AK completes its rebrand as the AKG, one might think of these enormous and sometimes slow-moving institutions not as separate and definite torpedoes in time, but as two of an innumerable school of vectors, moving darkly and imperceptibly all around us, through alternative histories and futures still to be determined.

¹ The Goodyear Family is not known for this address, and the house no longer stands. In 1903 the Goodyears moved into 888 Delaware Ave, a Châteauesque estate built by E.B. Green at the center of the city’s Millionaires’ Row. Though he had graduated from Yale in 1899, Conger lived at 888 Delaware until his marriage in 1908, when he and his first wife, Martha Forman, built a house at 160 Bryant.

² A. Conger’s father Charles W. Goodyear left a thriving career in law–in which he replaced Grover Cleveland as name partner at a Buffalo firm when Cleveland left to serve as New York State Governor–to build lumber, coal, and railway businesses. He and his brother Frank Goodyear had extensive lumber operations in New York and Pennsylvania, using new railroad technologies and rail spurs to access previously isolated areas of woodland. Establishing the Great Southern Lumber Company, they created the company town of Bogalusa, Louisiana for their workers, developing everything from housing and hotels to churches and the YMCA/YWCA from the ground up. The mill at Bogalusa was the largest in the world. Meanwhile Charles remained active in politics as a close confidant of Grover Cleveland, helping to orchestrate his gubernatorial election and pave the way for his ascent to the White House, where Charles and his wife Ella were the Clevelands’ first guests.

³ The social history of Buffalo’s aristocracy is a story of polite and sometimes mischievous schisms, much like the Presbyterian and Episcopalian churches to which the elite, for most of the city’s history, exclusively belonged.

In 1867 a group of notable Buffalonians, including future U.S. President Millard Filmore, founded the Buffalo Club, the city’s first social organization, eventually moving into the home of postwar industrialist Stephen Van Rensselaer Watson at 388 Delaware Avenue, where it remains today. Reading the early rolls of membership is like reading a map of Buffalo: Richmond, Cary, Rumsey, Sidway, Statler, Spaulding, Porter, Fargo, Jewett, and so on.

A generation later, in 1885, the rising scions decided they wanted a less formal place to socialize. While many retained memberships in their “fathers’ club,” they formed a second fraternity based on the “University clubs” popular at the time, eventually building a Tudor-style clubhouse at 977 Delaware. They played bridge; they drank; they decorated their wood-paneled halls with literary mottoes: “And the best of all ways / To lengthen our days / Is to steal a few hours from the night” and “Where the women cease from troubling and the wicked are at rest” (lately modified).

The wicked did rest a good long while under Saturn’s protection–until Prohibition.

On August 29, 1923, William J. “Wild Bill” Donovan, District Attorney of Buffalo, decorated WWI veteran, future father of the CIA–and at the time a Saturn Club member–directed federal agents to raid the club, where they discovered, according to court documents, sixty quarts of whisky, a similar amount of gin, five gallons of moonshine, and bottles of champagne, vermouth, and other liquors. These were not in the club’s cellars, but in the private lockers of prominent club members: among them industrialist George A. Forman, banker and magnate Seymour H. Knox II, poet and Congressman Peter A. Porter, Clarence Sidway, and the clubhouse architect, Duane Lyman.

The Saturn Club was no longer safe for merrymaking, and the mottoes on its walls rung hollow. Three years after Donovan’s raid, grandsons of the Saturn Club’s founders (and great grandsons of the Buffalo Club’s founders) split off to form a new and even more exclusive group, and sought a less conspicuous clubhouse where they might drink and play their cards unmolested.

Chuck Ramsdell, Bert Fenton, Joe Cary, and Frank Goodyear were among the founders of the Pack Corporation, or the Pack Club, in 1926, according to the few club documents that have, over the years, slipped out of members’ possession. According to these same documents, the purpose of the Pack Club (which kept membership at 52, like a pack of cards) was for its members “to gather in the long winter evenings to play bridge and exchange current gossip and news of the day in secluded surroundings, ‘far from the madding crowd.’”

Not too far, though. The Pack Club purchased the home of E.B. Green Jr., who had joined his father’s famed architecture practice and needed more than the modest trappings of 164 Elmwood Avenue. But it was perfect for an exclusive club, a Prohibition-era watering hole for the second- and third- and fourth-generation elite, hidden in plain sight.

⁴ The Wilcox house had served as the inauguration site for President Roosevelt after McKinley’s assassination, cementing old Ansley in the national and the local memory. Ansley Wilcox would continue to exert an influence as the century matured, even departing the frontier to join in pitched battle with New York City’s Bob Moses, as memorably chronicled in The Power Broker.

⁵ “Ostracized for a Picasso,” Goodyear told a crowd at the University at Buffalo in 1951.

⁶ Knox’s father raised horses on the family estate in East Aurora, where the younger Seymour learned to play. With the stature of a jockey–he was around 5’4”; close friends called him “Shorty”–Seymour took his team to the U.S. championship in 1932 and went on to play at the highest levels in Europe and South America. He gave up polo in the 60s.

⁷ This is essentially a direct quote from Petr Kotik, who told me this in a phone call June 16, 2021. His estimation is unchallenged.