Search results for ""Author Flora Miller Biddle""

A Look into the Privileged World of the American Aristocracy of the Early Twentieth Century Flora Miller Biddle was born a blue-blood. The granddaughter of the Whitney museum founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, her childhood played out in a sort of Wharton landscape as she was shielded from the woes of the world. But money itself is not the source of happiness. Glimpses into the elegance of a Vanderbilt ball thrown by her great-grandparents and the yearly production of traveling from her childhood home on Long Island to their summer home in Aiken, South Carolina, are measured against memoires of strict governesses with stricter rules in a childhood separate from her parents, despite being in the same house, and the ever-present pressure to measure up in her studies and lessons. As Flora steps back in time to trace the origins of her family’s fortune and where it stands today, she takes a discerning look at how wealth and excess shaped her life, for better and for worse. In this wonderfully evocative memoir, Flora Miller Biddle examines, critiques, and pays homage to the people and places of her childhood that shaped her life.

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Until Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened her studio on Eighth Street in Manhattan in 1914—which evolved into the Whitney Museum almost two decades later—there were few art museums in the United States, let alone galleries, for contemporary artists to exhibit their work. When the mansions of the wealthy cried out for decorative art, they sought it from Europe, then the art capital of the world. It was in her tiny sculptor’s studio in Greenwich Village that Whitney began holding exhibitions of contemporary American artists. This remarkable effort by a scion of America’s wealthiest family helped to change the way art was cultivated in America. The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made is the story of the high ideals, extraordinary altruism, and great dedication that stood steadfast against inflated egos, big business, and greed. Flora Biddle’s sensitive and insightful memoir is a success story of three generations of forceful, indomitable women.

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