By Anjali Krishna

All in good taste.

Over gin cocktails and French onion soup on the Upper East Side, three women start a revolution at lunchtime. They eat, drink, and laugh just a few blocks away from the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Central Park East, an institution simultaneously their enemy and their most cherished space in the city. In 1929, the Met sings the establishment tune, chasing at the heels of Ancient Greece, Rome, and Egypt. It begs for the artistic scraps of Caravaggio and Rembrandt, missing the movements of the city it inhabits.

While Europe ranges forward with Cubism, Impressionism, and pointillism, America’s foremost institution still hopes to deny the existence of the avant-garde. These women, seated at the best table in the restaurant, a view of the city before them, are its passionate champions and dearest collectors.

The Met, just blocks away, refuses to take their advice and their modern artwork. So they meet, on this sunny afternoon, to begin a revolution: The Museum of Modern Art.

10 West 54th Street — On the seventh floor of the tallest private home in New York City, Abby Aldrich Rockerfeller keeps her secret.

Hidden away in what should be her children’s playroom is her sacred space. Where her husband cannot see, Abby keeps a secret collection of Matisse, Picasso, and Rivera. The pious, straight-laced John D. Rockefeller — whom she loves dearly for his solemnity as much as for his philanthropic impulse — thinks Cezanne too vulgar to be shown in public. He prefers history paintings, Chinese porcelains, and Botticelli, so Abby collects clandestinely. She calls this gallery, tucked on her home’s highest floors with grey Bakelite walls and metal settings, Topside. 

It is Abby who convened this meeting and Abby who orders for their group at lunch: smoked salmon and classic salads, veal in tomato sauce. She knows the chef here, as it seems she does everywhere, and she laughs at the waiter’s ill-timed jokes with good humor. With savoir-faire like hers, it is no surprise that Abby is the richest woman at this table and her husband will be the richest man in the world when he inherits the Rockefeller fortune.

But even before she married a Rockerfeller, Abby was an Aldrich. Her father, who grew up on a farm only to later become the most powerful Republican in the Senate, knew the value of his daughters’ social education. Abby had her fortune read in Nice, sailed the Atlantic, and read voraciously: Emily Bronte, Henry James, Oliver Wendell Holmes. Abby is effervescent, intelligent, and unpredictable. “I confess, if I had my way,” Abby wrote to one of her sons, in her festive manner, “I really think I should like to give a party every day.” Amidst her Manhattan, of artists and galleries and parties, though, Abby finds something amiss. What is quickly becoming the greatest city in the world lacks a museum showing the art of today, tomorrow, and the future.

She loves art, the modern kind — but she does not know how to reconcile that with her husband. John detests modernism. Where he is straight-laced, she is intuitive, where he has wit, she has whimsy. They share the desire to be generous, to give to others. But Abby attends this meeting in secret, unremarkably written into her calendar as lunch with friends. When Abby tells him of her plans for a museum of modern art, to create a center in Manhattan itself, he does not throw his immense financial power behind the project which most impassions his beloved wife; he funds the construction of Met Cloisters and the renovation of Reims Cathedral instead. He throws his weight behind tradition while she questions it.

In the end, Abby finds the money herself. She becomes the MoMA’s treasurer.

1001 Park Avenue — Before she dies, Lillie P. Bliss demands that her personal papers be burned. She sets aflame what might have filled in the gaps of her piecemeal biography. In the factual remains of her story, Lillie is a spinster, a woman who lived with her mother for 60 years of life.

At lunch, Lillie’s table napkin folds carefully over her well-starched dress. It is rumored that she only has two outfits altogether, that she cares only for art as it hangs on her walls and touches her ears.

There are hints, in these remains, of secret affairs — perhaps with the MoMA’s director Alfred H. Barr — but her one true love was art. Lillie is quieter than the other women, just a few words, because she has spent the last few years coming into her own. She doesn’t talk like Abby — very few even can — but she has rid herself of the need to overexplain or justify. She is an early supporter of Arthur Davies’ paintings, who organized the Armory Show, and she spins with him through the Manhattan art world, where they define and redefine the value of flatness, line, and medium. Her taste speaks for itself.

Lillie buys Seurat, Renoir, and Degas, but she most ardently collects Cezanne, undeterred by negative reviews and accusations of his artistic amorality. She persuades the curators in her acquaintance to host Post-Impressionist shows, ignoring that accusations that Gauguin is odiously Bolshevik. She likes what she likes, and it certainly doesn’t make her a Marxist — she drove herself to lunch, in fact, in a shiny Pierce Arrow limousine.

This Boston Brahmin spends her life intertwined with artists, attending concerts and theatre and gallery openings, but like her affluent father, who refused on multiple occasions to run for public office, Lillie keeps her life private. She looks forward rather than inward.

At this lunch, she agrees to be the museum’s vice president. When she dies, Lillie gives 150 pieces to the MoMA, constituting the museum’s permanent collection.

Astoria, Queens — Mary Quinn Sullivan is more than a few minutes late to lunch. It surprises her, always, that her now-old friends are always sharp on time and even more than that they never fault her for constant lateness. Mary knows that she doesn’t belong on the Upper East Side. She has learned, at this point in her life, which of her phrases are Midwestern charming and which are Indianapolis-poor. But she has not yet rid herself of the pang in her chest when she hears Abby’s sparkling laugh or Lillie’s knowing smile.

These women are kind, open, and generous. Yet Mary knows that she married into her money when she married Cornelius; that she went to Pratt to study art while they learned its history from private tutors; that she taught drawing at public school to pay for room-and-board while they started giving money away.

She is Queens to their Manhattan, but she makes up the third of their trio all the same. Like them, she loves art. Once, she stranded herself in Paris after spending every last bit of her coin on a Rouault and Segonzac. She and Cornelius entertain artists, writers, and politicians regularly and they have a second home in Rhode Island. She knows Modigliani and Toulouse-Lautrec as well as Abby and Lillie, and she knows even better how these paintings came to be.

Mary is late because she was painting, a post-Impressionist landscape that came to her. These days, it’s a lark. She spends less time with her own art than with others’. She likes it better, she thinks, but sometimes she catches a glimpse of a Redon or Manet and wants to begin again. There isn’t much time, regardless; being rich makes you busy, Mary finds, and responsible for more than just yourself. Her word as a wealthy patron means more to artists now than it did when she was one of them. She sees herself in the abstractions, the theory splashed into paint and cracked open on a canvas.

When she married Cornelius, Mary left her work. But her legacy lives in the MoMA’s dedication to art education and accessibility. At their lunch, she vows to help the museum in whatever way she can.

Upper East Side, Manhattan, 1929 — Unwantedly, the three women have a fourth guest at lunch as well, a last-minute addition to Abby’s congregation for modernism. Anson Conger Goodyear is another modernist patron, and it is he that becomes the first president of the Museum of Modern Art. When Abby brought Lillie and Mary together, she knew that they needed a man to front their ambitions and tastes. Goodyear as president was a legitimizing choice, an understanding that each woman swallowed with their gin.

Their names aren’t on the door, but the Museum of Modern Art begins from the words on their lips, the labor of their hands, and the vision of their minds. What they have cannot be bought. ■