Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer

Couple
(1875-1959) and (1887-1970)
American

Relations
Child: Mrs. Ruth Meyer Epstein, Katharine Meyer Graham, Elizabeth Meyer Lorentz
Source: Marcel Bing

Place of activity: Mt. Kisco, New York, United States; New York, New York, United States; Washington, DC, United States;

Wall Street player, financier, entrepreneur, industrialist, government official, philanthropist, and eventual publisher of The Washington Post, Eugene I. Meyer, Jr. (1875-1959) and his wife, new woman, feminist, writer, reformer, and vocal and print advocate of modernist photography and European avant-garde art, Agnes Ernst Meyer (1887-1970), together developed a profound commitment to the collecting of Chinese and Japanese art. Their enthusiasm for the art of the Far East was ignited by the couples lasting friendship with museum founder, Charles Lang Freer (1854-1919), with whom they frequently consulted and collaborated in their purchases of Asian art, although they also purchased independently. In the first codicil to his Last Will and Testament, dated May 4, 1918, one of the provisions stipulating the terms of Freers gift to the nation of a museum of Asian art on the National Mall, the Meyers were among the small group he selectedalso including Louisine Havermeyer, Frank J. Hecker, and the museums architect, Charles A. Platt to oversee the possible expansion of the future museums Asian holdings. After Freers death in 1919, the Meyers continued to show deep commitment to the institution Freer had founded. During the last decade of her life, in a series of bequests in 1961, 1968, and 1970, Agnes Meyer donated to the Freer Gallery of Art the collection of ancient Chinese painting, sculpture, ceramics, metalwork, jade and calligraphy; also Japanese painting and prints; as well as later Chinese art and Buddhist sculpture, which she and her husband had amassed.

Both husband and wife were independent thinkers, neither chose to fulfill the destiny their parents had envisioned for them. Eugene Meyer, Jr. was descended from a distinguished Jewish family with long-established roots in the Alsace-Lorraine region of France. His great-great-grandfather was one of the Jewish notables whom Napoleon I had consulted about the rights of Jewish citizens. Eugenes father (Eugene, Sr.) left France to come to the New World, and established himself first in Los Angeles before moving to San Francisco, and eventually settling in New York to become a partner in the distinguished financial firm of Lazard-Frres. His son, Eugene, Jr.,completed the first year of college at the University of California, Berkeley, before finishing his undergraduate studies at Yale University in 1895. He traveled in Europe, worked at several banks, and formulated his own entrepreneurial roadmap, opting not to join Lazard-Frres as his father had hoped. Instead, he used his intellect and acumen to found his own equities firm in 1904, and became highly successful in both the private and public sectors. Eugene Meyers early interest in art collecting focused on etchings by such old and modern masters as Albrecht Durer and James McNeill Whistler, as well as on historic American manuscripts. He would not start collecting Asian art until after his 1910 marriage to Agnes Ernst, later Agnes Meyer.

As noted in the memoirs of the Meyers daughter, publisher Katharine Graham, it was a chance sighting of the beautiful young Agnes Ernst at a 1908 New York gallery opening that led to Eugene Meyers ultimately successful pursuit of her. Agnes came from a stern puritanical Lutheran family, whose values she summarily discarded as a young woman. The recipient of a scholarship to Barnard College in 1903, she began to pursue a career in journalism, fueled in part by an interest in the causes of public education and womens rights. It was in her final year at Barnard in 1907 that, according to her daughter, Agnes developed the first of a series of lasting crushes on men of intellect and distinction, such as the artists Marius de Zayas, Max Weber, and John Marin. She established friendships with prominent avant-garde artistic figures including Alfred Stieglitz, Edward Steichen, and Georgia OKeeffe, and frequented Stieglitzs Gallery 291, then one of the rare outposts for modernist art and photography. Agnes edited and contributed texts and poems to the Gallery publication 291. After college, she traveled to Europe and plunged into what was then considered a self-styled bohemian life, meeting major artists and intellectual figures, including Leo Stein, Constantin Brancusi, Madame Curie, and Auguste Rodin, the latter to whom Agnes was introduced by Eugene, on one of his visits to Paris.

As Agnes would later recollect and publish in a 1953 autobiography, Out of These Roots: The Autobiography of an American Woman, it would be on what she described as an epoch making visit to the British Museum in 1909 that an exhibit of Chinese painting stirred her so profoundly that she fell in love at first sight completely, hopelessly, and forever with Chinese art. Agnes and Eugenes honeymoon, a few years later, took them to such destinations as Japan, Korea, and Russia, travels which ignited Eugenes interest in Asian art, and subsequent involvement, along with Charles Lang Freer, in a committee formed in Peking to establish the American School of Architecture, jointly sponsored by the Archeological Institute of America and the Smithsonian Institution. The goal was to ensure that the removal of Chinese art not be the work of amateurs, but rather be of trained archaeologists. It also sought to interpret the art of the Orient to the Occident and to make intelligible the art of the Occident to the Orient. Although this initiative was not successful, it provided the opportunity for the Meyers to work alongside Freer, whom they had previously met.

Of their first encounter with Freer, Agnes would later reminiscence: To be suddenly confronted by this hero in person was an overwhelming event. Their friendship expanded to become a pattern of reciprocal visits: the Meyers to Freers residence in Detroit, and Freer to the Meyers estate in Mount Kisco, New Yorkdesigned by the architect Platt who would later design the Freer Galleryas well as to their apartment in the city. The mutual hospitality between the collectors granted each exposure to the others holdings, and initiated a pattern of joint purchases of Asian art.

Writing about Freer and his collection at the end of her life, she characterized her own friendship with the much older Freer, whom she referred to as General, and acknowledged their rapport as so passionate in its intensity because we both loved China, its history, its earth-bound philosophy, and the art objects which resulted from this profound union of thought and deed. Originally inspired by collections of Asian art which Agnes saw in Europe in the spring of 1914, she suggested that Stieglitz, whom she had known since her involvement in Gallery 291, hold an exhibit of Chinese art alongside works by Czanne and Picasso. Although the proposed exhibit never materialized, the underlying idea was in sympathy with Freers belief in the existence of aesthetic correspondences between Asian art and Western modernism.

Through most of their collecting career, Eugene and Agnes Meyer relied on Freer as a profoundly valued friend, connoisseur, and collector of early Chinese art. While they were often independent in their own collecting, there was interaction and collaboration with Freer in some of their purchases. Sometimes they made purchases jointly, negotiating the price and dividing the objects among their respective collections. In the case of an outstanding group of bronzes owned by Marcel Bing in Paris in 1915, to be sold through C.T. Loos gallery, Freer led the negotiations with Bing and attempted to reduce the initial offer, but Eugene stepped in as advisor and they paid the asking price in the end. Among the acquisitions from this exchange were a group of ancient Chinese ritual bronzestoday in the collection of the Freer/Sackler Galleries owned jointly by the Meyers and Freer, and lent by them to a landmark exhibition in 1916 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Among these bronzes was a ritual pouring vessel, Lidded ritual ewer (guang) [F1961.33a-b], from the Middle Yangzi Valley, with imagery of real and fantastic animals on its surface. Subsequent archaeological finds date it to c. 1100-1050 BCE; the piece was donated to the Freer Gallery by Agnes Meyer in 1961. Another important bronze object they offered to the 1916 exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum was a large ritual food container known as the Taibao gui, c. 11th BCE [F1968.29]. After this ancient piece was on view at the Metropolitan Museum, the Meyers took it to Mount Kisco and famously displayed it on their piano, where the container remained until it entered the Freer Gallery after Agness death in 1970. These Chinese bronzes were the first of their kind, antiquity, and quality to be displayed in the United States.

Agnes interest in Chinese paintings deepened during the years of World War I, leading to acquisitions selected from shipments sent from China to Freer. In 1916 the Meyers acquired twenty paintings from Pang Yuanij, ten of which were published in a catalogue Antique Famous Chinese Paintings Collected by Pang Lai Chen. Freer advised the Meyers about which paintings to select, as recorded in his annotated copy of this catalogue. Among the works the Meyers purchased was a delicately painted 17th century Ming Dynasty hanging scroll, Birds in Wintry Trees [F1930.32], depicting a frigid winter scene of weathered cypress trees and scattered birds situated above a steep precipice. In her diary entries, Agnes credited Freers counsel about the purchase: What a lucky devil I am. Such beauty and such a wonderful friend.

In the fall of 1917, the Meyers moved to Washington D.C. when Eugene became a member of the Advisory Committee of the Council of National Defense, among other public positions he would hold before purchasing The Washington Post in 1933. When the Meyers completed the construction of their Mount Kisco house, Freer sent two large Tang dynasty painted pottery guardian tomb figures from the early 8th century CE to mark the houses opening; these sculptural pieces are now in the collection of the Freer Gallery [F1968.41a-b-42a-b]. The house, where Freer was himself a frequent guest, contained the Meyerss collection of European modernist art and their Asian holdings, interior assemblages which would be recorded by the modernist photographer and painter, Charles Sheeler, in a series of photographs from about 1919. Sheelers documentation includes one photograph of Freers gift of the two pottery Tang guardian tomb figures displayed on the mantel in their study. Eugene Meyers involvement with the familys art acquisitions dwindled because of his other commitments; however, his crucial financial backing of the couples purchases remained an important constant. In fact, Freer depended on Eugene Meyers financial advice in freeing funds for purchases and for the eventual establishment of the Gallery in his name.

Agnes Meyer remained active in the administering of the Freer Gallery of Art, which opened in 1923, four years after Freers death, including her participation in negotiations about the parameters of curatorial responsibility. She would later acknowledge that her own interest in acquiring art receded in the years following Freers death and, still grief stricken, she could not bear to attend the official opening of the Gallery.

It is noteworthy that little of the extraordinary collection of Chinese and Japanese art that had been assembled by the Meyers had been displayed in the public domain before it entered the Freer Gallery, through her donations and a series of bequests she made after her husbands death in 1959. The contribution of the Meyers holdings encompassed what was the largest expansion of the collection of the Freer Gallery of Art, since the founders gift in 1919. In her final writings about Freer, Charles Lang Freer and His Gallery, published in 1970, the year of her death, Agnes Meyer spoke of the special bonds of friendship between her husband and Freer, both of them men of commerce, and about Freers and her commitment to Chinese art and culture: to both of us it was a unique experience to explore an unknown civilization, not at second hand but by its actual products which conveyed its quality with a freshness of impact that no amount of derivative information can give.

Scholarly resources include an artist file for Agnes Meyer at the Freer Gallery of Art (http://www.sil.si.edu/digitalcollections/artdesign/artandartistfiles/vf_details.cfm?id=88392) and records of the 1971 Eugene and Agnes E. Meyer Memorial Exhibition. There are references to Agnes Meyers contributions in the institutions administrative records from 1993-1990, and documentation about both Eugene and Agnes Meyer are available in the Charles Lang Freer Papers. [See (http://siarchives.si.edu/collections/siris_arc_238779) and (http://www.asia.si.edu/archives/finding_aids/Freer.html).]

 

Literature
Allen, Henry. "Meyer Collection -- A Legacy, A Gift." The Washington Post, September 27, 1971. B1, B3.
Bosch-Reitz, S.C. Catalogue of an Exhibition of Early Chinese Pottery and Sculpture. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1916.
Carper, Elsie. "Agnes E. Meyer: Writer, Critic, Champion of Reform." The Washington Post, September 2, 1970: A12.
Chudzicka, Dorota. "In Love at First Sight Completely, Hopelessly, and Forever with Chinese Art: The Eugene and Agnes Meyer Collection of Chinese Art at the Freer Gallery of Art,"Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archive Professionals 10, no. 3 (Summer 2014): 331-340.
Cohen, Warren I. East Asian Art and American Culture: A Study in International Relations. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992.
Graham, Katharine. Personal History. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.
Hyland, Douglas K. S. "Agnes Ernst Meyer, Patron of American Modernism." The American Art Journal 12, no. 1 (1980): 64-81.
Lawton, Thomas and Linda Merrill. Freer: A Legacy of Art. Washington D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution; New York, in association with H.N. Abrams, 1993.
Meyer, Agnes, E. Out of These Roots: The Autobiography of American Woman. Boston: Little Brown, 1953.
Meyer, Agnes. Charles Lang Freer and His Gallery. Washington D.C.: Freer Gallery of Art, 1970.