HUO So you could say she was the artist’s accomplice.
WH Exactly. She didn’t have other rich people on her board. She had Man Ray and Duchamp—having artists in this capacity is nothing but trouble, conventionally.
HUO You also mentioned Alfred Barr and James Johnson Sweeney.
WH Yes. Barr, who came from a Protestant Yankee family, might have become a Lutheran minister. Instead he became a great director and curator with an institution that had all the resources the Rockefellers, and others, could provide at the time. There was a kind of moral imperative behind Barr. He preached that Modern art was good for people, that the populace could somehow become inculcated with the new Modernism and it would improve their lives. It’s very close to a Bauhaus idea.
Sweeney was more complicated and romantic. I don’t think he would have argued that art per se was necessarily morally good for you, but I don’t think he made a big case that it was not. But Sweeney was a genuine romantic who felt that the aesthetic experience was a whole other territory to explore. He was like an explorer. For him, Picasso was one of the great adventurers, you know. Sweeney was one of the first in his generation to admire Picasso. He worked briefly at The Museum of Modern Art, and then later at the Guggenheim.
HUO And then in Houston?
WH Yes, he was at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, for a while, at the very end of his career. He responded instinctively to the Abstract Expressionists. And because of his work in France during his youth—in literary journals and so on—he was responsive to the Tachistes as well, and was just beginning to have a certain empathy, a certain response, to the Nouveaux Réalistes, right before he died. I think if he had been younger—and alive, for example—he would have been the greatest champion of Yves Klein. Sweeney was also one of the most rigorous people in working out an installation. When I was young, I had the chance to actually see him in the old Guggenheim townhouse before the Frank Lloyd Wright building was constructed. He was never happy with the Wright building. It was a clash of two giant egos. Sweeney wanted something more neutral for his own stagecraft where the art could happen. However, one gorgeous show he did do in the Wright building was the [Alexander] Calder show.
HUO In curating there is a need for flexible strategies. Every show is a unique situation, and ideally it gets as close as possible to the artist.
WH Yes. To me, a body of work by a given artist has an inherent kind of score that you try to relate to or understand. It puts you in a certain psychological state. I always tried to get as peaceful and calm as possible. If there was a simple way of doing something, I would do it that way. When I did the Duchamp retrospective in 1963, he and I walked through the old Pasadena Art Museum—the colors were white and off-white and brown; there was some wood paneling; some dark brown. Duchamp said: “It’s just fine. Don’t do anything that is too hard to do.” In other words, he was always very practical. But he had a very subtle way of trying to orchestrate or bring out what was already there, to work with what was already given. Duchamp knew exactly how to work with what was there.
But with other artists installations were very different. Barnett Newman was a very bright man, but he would get a preconceived notion of how the space should be. Wherever I showed him, we always had to do a lot of construction.
HUO You mean the São Paulo Biennale in 1965?
WH There, and then when I showed him in Washington. There was a huge wall that had distracting stuff way above, where the paintings were shown. It bothered Newman so much—but nobody else—that we had to build a false wall about ten meters high, at great expense and difficulty.
HUO In terms of flexibility, in the 1960s and, above all, the 1970s, the European Kunsthalle was defined as something of a laboratory, where things could be tested, without the pressures of public success and thousands of square meters to be filled.
WH Yes. This is similar to the tradition behind Dominique de Menil, through her father’s family, the Schlumbergers, in engineering. You could remove “Menil Collection” from the building’s facade and call it “de Menil Research,” and it would look like an engineering building.
HUO Was this the intention behind selecting Renzo Piano as the architect?
WH Absolutely. It’s one reason we chose Piano, whose great love is engineering. I think his ancestors were shipbuilders, and there’s nothing more beautiful than a ship. But its form is absolutely rational.
Before Jean de Menil died in 1974, he wanted Louis Kahn to build the new museum. Philip Johnson’s chapel already existed, so a kind of peaceful sanctuary had already been achieved. And Jean de Menil wanted the new museum, with these pavilions, on the same land in the park. Kahn died about a year later, so it was never possible to continue it. But I think Piano’s engineered public space works well against the more contained sanctuary space of the Rothko Chapel.
HUO You’ve also mentioned René d’Harnoncourt as an influence.
WH Yes, he was special. Nelson Rockefeller was fortunate to have met him. He was yet another person whose background was in the sciences, in chemistry. He could have become an engineer-businessman in one of the great dye works of the chemical industries. But through his love of art—and ancient art, too—d’Harnoncourt became one of those who felt, instinctively, that there were archetypes of form in ancient art, relating any number of things that existed in the so-called tribal or primitive arts to what went on with the modern. When he came to The Museum of Modern Art, he saw something deeper and broader going on with Pollock, deeper than Pollock simply being influenced by the French Surrealists—that Pollock, in his way, was going back to some of the ancient sources that the Surrealists themselves went to.
D’Harnoncourt had a kind of stature as a diplomat who could keep all the departments, all the egos, more or less in balance. He was brought in to MoMA after Alfred Barr had had a nervous breakdown, and his main job, as far as Nelson Rockefeller was concerned, was to help support Barr—which he did do; they got along well.
I think the other one on this list is Jermayne MacAgy. She was the mistress, or the master, of beautiful theme shows. Her greatest work was in San Francisco. She once did a show there around the theme of time. There’s a work by Chagall titled Time Is a River without Banks [1930–1939] . I think the phrase intrigued MacAgy—more so even than the work. Her exhibit was ahistorical, coming from any period, and cross-cultural. She included clocks and timepieces. She had a Dali with little clocks and so on, as well as all kinds of references and allusions to time—in old and new work.
In another exhibition, the California Palace of the Legion of Honor in San Francisco wanted a show of arms and armor. She did a fantastic piece of drama as a set piece for it. She made a huge chessboard in the great atrium—and lined up the figures as two competing sides.
HUO How did MacAgy’s theme shows avoid subordinating the work to the overall concept?
WH She had a very sure and spare touch, for the most part.
HUO You also mentioned her shows in terms of an almost-empty design.
WH Yes. She managed to ignore design systems—or tried to work outside systems of taste for these
