Monday,
May 25, 1931
In the five rooms and hallway that constitute the Museum of Modern Art in the Heckscher Building, Manhattan, last week hung the best collection of modern painting yet seen there — woodcuts and paintings by Gauguin, several vivid Cezannes, a Seurat seascape, a colorful Degas, splendid examples of Frenchmen Monet, Renoir, Redon, Daumier, Picasso, Matisse, Guys and of U. S. Artists Davies, Charles and Maurice Prendergast, Dougherty, Kuhn. More newsworthy than the exhibition's quality, however, was the fact that these paintings were now the Museum's property. Before the public was invited to look, a memorial service was held for the lady who had not loaned but given her collection. She died last March at 66, Miss Lizzie P. ("Lillie") Bliss, daughter of the late Cornelius Newton Bliss, President McKinley's Secretary of the Interior and rich president of Bliss, Fabyan & Co. (wholesale drygoods). For her father, Lillie Bliss was hostess and housekeeper, until he died in 1911. She had learned kindness and sociability in this career, and in 1912 she stepped not only into wealth but popularity. Artists such as the late Arthur B. Davies, actors like Walter Hampden, Ruth Draper, Ethel Barrymore, and many a musician attended her formal, wineless soirees. By 1913 she was helping organize the historic exhibition in Manhattan's Squadron "A" Armory, which introduced a continent to Modernism. One of the earliest collectors of modern paintings, in 1929 she was co-founder (with Mrs. John Davison Rockefeller and Mrs. Cornelius J. Sullivan) of the Museum of Modern Art, to which she bequeathed almost all that she had bought, pruned, guarded. A loan exhibition of her good friend and adviser Artist Davies hung beside her bequests last week. Critics agreed that the Bliss Collection has now made the Modern Museum what it was founded to become, a lively purgatory wherein promising new arrivals may await, as French artists wait in the Luxembourg for the Louvre, admission to the musty paradise of the Metropolitan Museum.
From:
TIME online, 2011