Paul Mellon was born in Pittsburgh in 1907. His paternal grandfather Thomas Mellon left Ulster for the United States and at the age of fifty-six opened his own private bank—the Mellon Bank—which his son Andrew inherited. Such was Andrew Mellon’s acumen that he and his brother were among the four richest men in America.
After an unhappy childhood (his parents suffered a very public divorce in 1912), Paul Mellon read various subjects at Yale followed by a happy year at Cambridge, England, where he discovered fox-hunting and horse racing—a lifelong passion.
Mellon was made a founder trustee of his father’s A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust in 1930 to which all the family pictures were transferred with a view to donating them to the nation. His own collecting began in earnest in the late 1940s, encouraged by Chester Dale and by his wife Bunny’s enthusiasm for nineteenth-century French painting. The meeting with the British art historian Basil Taylor first fuelled his enthusiasm for collecting British art at a time when this area was greatly undervalued. In his autobiography Reflections in a Silver Spoon Mr Mellon describes himself as an Incurable Collector.
Paul Mellon’s generosity to educational, artistic and environmental causes is astonishing—over $600 million in all—made primarily through the Paul Mellon Foundation and the Old Dominion Foundation. Beneficiaries include the National Gallery of Art, Washington ($143.3 million); the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge ($3.55 million); the establishment and endowment works of the Yale Center for British Art and gifts of works of art for its collection ($214 million); Choate Rosemary Hall, Yale University ($29.4 million); the Virginia Outdoors Foundation ($11.7 million); and the Royal Veterinary College, University of London ($5.4 million).
Mr Mellon, at the end of your memoir Reflections in a Silver Spoon, you say “privacy is the most important asset money can buy”. Why then did you write this book?
Paul Mellon: The book hasn’t in any way curtailed my privacy because I still have the same life; I still have people to answer the telephone; I still have a private airplane and my travel plans are unannounced; and I lead my own life. The fact that I wrote the book may have suggested that I spoke a lot about private things, but that is not really what I mean by privacy in one’s life.
On the list of activities you have pursued, where would you place the enjoyment and appreciation of art?
I think what your question means is, where in the hierarchy of importance would I put my collecting, and I think I would safely put it as one of the most important things in my life, certainly ahead of the army and horses, farmer and publisher.
I’m interested in the way you were attracted to British art. You say in your book that in June 1959 you had lunch at Claridge’s with Basil Taylor and then began collecting British art. You thought British art had been “needlessly neglected and undervalued and that somebody ought to do something about it”. To what extent was your decision influenced by wanting to be that somebody, to make your mark in a field others had ignored?
I don’t think it had anything to do with my wanting to make my “mark”, or with some ambition to be the newest Mr Huntington. When I first started, I was not exactly working toward a goal, but having fun collecting with Basil Taylor’s assistance. It was really for myself at that time, in the same way that my buying the picture by Stubbs of Pumpkin with a Stable Lad in 1936 was for myself. I remember that luncheon with Basil absolutely perfectly, and that I’d been at the National Gallery or the Tate, and I had a postcard with me of one of those primitive paintings, naïve paintings, of a cricket match—they still have postcards of it. And I remember taking it out of my pocket and showing it to Basil and saying, now, this is the kind of thing I’m interested in, as well as horses, because it gives me a feeling of English life. In my whole life of collecting—and I suppose it’s a little bit to assuage my conscience—I’ve always been able to say to myself that I’m allowed to have these things and enjoy them, but eventually they’re all going to museums. It may be that one of my children might want one or two of them, but nobody these days has the houses to hang pictures in the way Bunny and I have done, and I’ve always known that the public will eventually enjoy them. But I don’t remember when that idea took over; probably two or three years after I started working with Basil.
Your father had a marvellous collection of Old Master paintings, and you and Mrs Mellon have purchased French paintings. Did you never think, “Here’s something that’s been neglected and so I’ll step in and begin collecting this”?
I think I talked to Basil about the fact that in America everybody thought of English paintings as being what my father collected or Mr Huntington collected or Mr Frick collected—all those big portraits. They’re beautiful of course, but it amused me to wonder which artists people in America would think about if you talked about English landscapes. Hardly anybody would think of Richard Wilson or Wright of Derby for instance—they’d think of Turner or Constable. As time went on and Basil began showing me all of these things, it gradually came over me that it would be nice for the American people to see that English art was much more variegated and lively than just these big portraits.
I’m interested in the process you go through when you look at a painting. You wrote that in 1936 you bought your first painting (still your favourite British painting) George Stubbs’s “Pumpkin with a Stable Lad”, immediately you saw it. You describe yourself as an intuitive rather than an analytical collector; has this changed at all over the years?
Only, I think, in so far as I’ve seen so many pictures over the years that I must have picked up some knowledge and a sort of an overview of what there is in English art, so that I can make better comparisons. But I still rely on intuition and feeling.
Throughout your book you mention many of the art world’s leading figures, including Lord Duveen, whom you describe as “an impossibly bumptious and opinionated ass who took advantage of any opportunity that presented itself to burnish his image and to further his own interests”. Are there any for whom you have a particularly high regard?
Oh, yes. I always thought very, very highly of Geoffrey Agnew. I met Agnew very early on as a collector, in fact when the Virginia Museum put on that first exhibition of “Sport and the Horse” whose selection committee I headed. I’ve always thought of Agnew as being the exact antithesis of Duveen. He was dignified, he was knowledgeable, and he obviously had great feeling not only for British art but all kinds of art. I just respected him as being one of the top people—maybe the top person—in the trade. There were others whom I liked, that I thought were particularly honest and whose opinions I respected. I have bought a lot of drawings, for instance, from Sidney Sabin and Bill Drummond who were partners. I also did a great deal of business with Alfred Gates, director of Ackermann’s, and I had great respect for him. And, of course, my co-author John Baskett sold me many fine paintings and drawings before he retired as an art dealer, and I have the highest respect for his taste and integrity. None of these were like Duveen. I knew Duveen when I was between fifteen and twenty years old. I would see him with my father and hear them talking about paintings and so forth. Then, you know, he testified in my father’s tax trial, and he really made an absolute ass of himself because he didn’t know his geography of Washington. When they asked him where it was that my father had wanted to build the gallery, he said something like, “Well, you know, it’s that place near the pond—between the pond and the obelisk”, meaning the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool.
Are there any people in the academic or the museum world for whom you have a particularly high regard?
I’ve always thought very highly of Michael Jaffé, until recently Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, and I’ve had quite a lot of pleasant conversations with him. Through Michael Jaffé I’ve spent some time at the Hamilton Kerr conservation centre near Cambridge. Among others who come to mind are Sir Ellis Waterhouse, Christopher White, Martin Butlin and Graham Reynolds. John Harris was of great help to me in collecting architectural drawings, and I’ve always admired his grasp of that field. And of course Judy Egerton, former assistant to Martin Butlin, was invaluable to me in writing about my sporting art paintings, drawings and prints catalogues, along with Dudley Snelgrove, who was also invaluable to me in collecting prints and drawings. I thought Alan Bowness, former director of the Tate, was a very good man, but I can’t say that I’ve known intimately very many of the museum people either in England or in the States. You’d think with my connections at the National Gallery, Washington, and the Virginia Museum and Yale that I would know more people in the field, but I just don’t.
You mention your father’s tax case and you go to great lengths to set the record straight. [In 1931 Andrew Mellon was accused by Congressman Louis McFadden of cheating on his 1931 income tax return and in March 1934 the Roosevelt administration duly announced that it would seek criminal tax evasion charges for $1.3 million. The case was subsequently dismissed but a rumour arose that Andrew Mellon had done a deal with Roosevelt, offering to build a gallery and give his collection to the nation if the administration would stop hounding him.]
Yes.
Why do you think that the stories have continued even to this day about the supposed link between the tax case and the gift of funds to build the National Gallery?
I suppose it’s natural. People think, well now, here’s a man who’s been accused of fraud and so forth and shortly after that it comes out that he’s given a big thing to the government. But I think it’s too bad that it keeps cropping up all the time. In the book I quote a letter from my father when I was at Cambridge, and I remember talking to my father about the National Gallery as early as 1928. Well, that was six years before the tax trial. Also in 1930, I believe it was, he formed the A.W. Mellon Educational and Charitable Trust. He put all the pictures in it. This was in 1930 or ’31. Well, that was two or three years before the tax accusations. So it was obvious that my father had been thinking of this long before. What most people think is extraordinary is that after the government and Roosevelt came out with this thing, it would have been a perfectly human reaction of my father’s to say, well the hell with it, I won’t give it to the nation if they’re going to accuse me of fraud. I’ll build my own museum in Pittsburgh, or someplace else, or give my paintings to the National Gallery in London.
When you’ve made your gifts to the various museums, you have given them with the stipulation that none of the works of art may ever be sold. Can you foresee any circumstances when an exception might be made to this rule?
I don’t think so, no. I’ve thought about that and I think it’s a bad policy for any museum to be known to be selling pictures or any work of art. A donor could of course stipulate in his gift that he didn’t care whether the works were sold or not. Some donors might have great works of art which they’ve lost interest in, or that belonged to their father or their grandfather. I can see that in such a case they might make a gift of paintings or other works of art for tax reasons, for example, and wouldn’t care if they were sold or not. I would understand that, but at the same time from a personal point of view, or a museum executive point of view, I think it’s a mistake. I think if a museum gets to be talked about “Oh, well, they’ve sold this and they’ve sold that”—I for one would want to make very sure that whatever I gave them couldn’t be sold.
So you think that as a general rule, museums should not sell works of art?
They should not, because who’s to decide: these things go in tremendous waves of fashion. Maybe fifty years from now, everybody’ll be laughing at the Impressionists! Well, that’s alright, a hundred more years and then, for some strange reason, they’ll come back into favour. Even if paintings are unpopular or even if people think they are bad paintings for a while, they’re useful for art students.
Since the days when institutions such as the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art in New York were established, many more museums have been founded bearing their founders’ names. From what you’ve seen as both founder and trustee, can you discern where art-philanthropy might be heading?
I have no idea where it’s heading, but I understand completely why people want to have their names on things. My reason for not having done it myself and my father’s reasons for not having done it with the National Gallery is that, in the case of Yale, I’m looking forward to the day when there’ll be other people interested in English art who will give paintings or money to the Center for British Art just because it is the Center for British Art, where they wouldn’t do it if it was the Paul Mellon Center for British Art. I have to admit I’m not as eager to give money or pictures, say, to a Carnegie Museum as to a Museum of Modern Art, and I’d rather give to the Museum of Modern Art than the Guggenheim Museum. That’s safe to say because I haven’t any of that kind of art.
Last summer, when the Sainsbury Wing was being dedicated at the National Gallery, Lord Sainsbury said in his speech that, while he was very happy to have provided that money for the Wing, he really thought the government should have paid for it. Do you see that as the difference between the way that Americans view philanthropy in the arts as opposed to the way the English view it?
I think government ought to be interested in giving money to the arts. I think they should remember the way our Congress, at the behest of my father and my father’s lawyers, agreed from the outset to underwrite all the maintenance and security and everything to do with the physical appearance and upkeep of the National Gallery in Washington. That was guaranteed in perpetuity, and that to me is a very sensible way of the government taking care of the arts. I think the government giving money for the National Endowment for the Arts and then trying to decide what’s art and what isn’t is a mistake. That’s something that ought to be taken care of by private citizens. Perhaps most artists today and most museums would say I’m wrong about that. But to me it just seems wrong to have the government involved in any kind of censorship or questions of taste. I think I’d rather leave that up to the private sector.
But do you think that there’s some way that the NEA can be reformed or changed so that it can serve that purpose?
No, that would be a mistake. I think now that it exists it ought to be giving money to these things, but I think it ought to be taking the advice of the panels of artists and museum people. The idea of trying to second guess those advisers is wrong. I also think all this business about pornography is ridiculous. If the NEA hadn’t said anything about the Mapplethorpe show, nobody would really have complained. Well perhaps a few, well-intentioned people like Jesse Helms [the senator who criticised the NEA vigorously for allocating public funds to pornographic and blasphemous art] might have said these things are disgusting. As far as I’m concerned, some of them are disgusting, but I don’t think it’s up to me to say so. If it’s a thing that the public thinks is wrong or that isn’t really, truly, basically artistic it’ll fade away anyway—ten years from now nobody’ll think about it.
At the beginning of your memoir is a quotation from a letter by John Adams to his wife: “I must study politics and war, that my sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy. My sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain”. Your grandfather’s and father’s legacy enabled you to do just that—to study and enjoy the arts. What would you say is your legacy to the next generation?
My legacy to my children would be not to try to influence them in any way as to what they should study. You notice in that quotation that Adams says that they may study so and so. If my son and my daughter haven’t taken up the same interest in art that I have, I see no reason that they should have, and I see no reason to tell them they ought to study this or they ought to do that. In fact you might say that they ought to start back at the beginning and study politics and war because, looking at the world today, maybe there are a lot more useful things to study than art and architecture.
- Paul Mellon with John Baskett, Reflections in a Silver Spoon, a memoir (William Morrow, New York, and John Murray, London, 1992), 444pp, 96 b/w, 17 col ills. £19.95/$27.00.)