Franz Klein's Cross Section: part of the Wrights' assault on complacency.
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IN 1973, I WAS ASKED by the members of the Empty Space Theater collective to join their number as business manager. I soon learned that being Empty Space's manager meant sorting through a cardboard box of unpaid bills and unanswered letters from the Internal Revenue Service, and discovering that the artistically admired ensemble had assets of $85.02 and more than $5,000 in debts—not to mention $3,500 owing on state and local taxes.
I had no choice but to call the investor and art collector Bagley Wright to explain the theater's situation, and to ask Mr. Wright to act as security for a one-year, $10,000 line of credit to help the Space get on its financial feet. After my brief presentation, Mr. Wright asked only one question: What is the name and branch of your bank?
In her Seattle magazine feature on Virginia and Bagley Wright, occasioned by the Seattle Art Museum's current show of works from the couple's 50 years of collecting, Sheila Farr tries to measure the Wrights' impact on their city by imagining away evidence of their presence. She concludes the city would be a far poorer place: "[F]irst, erase the Space Needle. . . . Take away Seattle Repertory Theater. Start eliminating the city's public artworks: the striking Barnett Newman 'Broken Obelisk' on the UW campus; Michael Heizer's landmark 'Adjacent, Against, Upon' at Myrtle Edwards Park on the waterfront, SAM's 'Hammering Man.' . . . Blur the profiles and take the bloom from the cheeks of the Seattle Art Museum, the Seattle Symphony, Seattle Opera, and many other local arts organizations—all recipients of the Wrights' direction and largess. . . ."
All-embracing as Farr's tribute is, in some ways it doesn't go far enough. It's unlikely, for example, that you would be reading these words at all had Bagley Wright not made a substantial investment in the fledgling Seattle Weekly, and invested more during the long years when the paper failed to turn a profit. Perhaps as significant as all their acknowledged benefactions combined is the effect on others of their example, urging, persuading, irritating the sublimely complacent Seattle establishment into aspiring to something beyond the pale-beige tokens of the Northwest Good Life.
WELL BEFORE VIRGINIA Bloedel was born, the family-owned lumber firm founded by her grandfather had largely completed the deforestation of Whatcom County and moved on to Vancouver Island and the BC mainland, where, much amalgamated and merged, it continues its rape of the land as the multinational MacMillan Bloedel Ltd., one of the biggest and most powerful wood- and timber-product companies in the world.
No one batted an eye when young Virginia decided to study art history at Barnard; there was plenty of time to settle down and, when the time came, plenty of appropriate bachelor sons to choose from among the Northwest's tight-knit timber clan. But Virginia instead chose to marry "an outsider"—a Long Island-bred, Princeton-educated journalist, of all things.
Even that might have been forgiven in time. But when Virginia and Bagley decided to relocate to Seattle, accompanied by a pair of newborn twins and a small but select art collection, Seattle slowly became aware that they had picked up some pretty strong colors from their wild-oats years in the lap of the Harlot of the Hudson, and that they had no intention of adopting the compulsory beige of their new surroundings.
It wasn't that the Wrights were unconventional or flamboyant personally; that the establishment could have dealt with easily, simply closing the door on them as it has on so many others. But no, socially their behavior was irreproachable: It was their taste that rankled—or, more accurately, their casual assumption that taste was something civilized people have, something more definite and conscious than an uncompromised adherence to the customs of the tribe. They confronted you with the material consequences of their conviction (a dinner guest once demanded a different place at the table so she wouldn't have look at a Rothko as she ate); and they encouraged others to go and do likewise.
One of the first to feel the heat was Dr. Richard E. Fuller, founder and sole proprietor of the Seattle Art Museum, a gentle soul whose greatest artistic passion was for jade snuff paraphernalia, and for whom the pallid confetti whorl-paintings of Mark Tobey marked the outer limits of the modern in art. Mrs. Wright had no problem with Tobey; but she wanted more for the museum and for Seattle, and so was founded (more or less over the restlessly squirming body of Dr. Fuller) the Contemporary Arts Council. The battle for the soul of SAM began.
That might have been a sufficient beachhead for many, but Mrs. Wright, with the often bemused but always supportive Mr. Wright in the background, had only begun to fight. She opened a tiny gallery in Pioneer Square, devoted to affordable prints by New York's finest. It proved to be where many Seattle collectors apprenticed in the acquisition game. Through a foundation set up by her father, she assembled a collection of monumental outdoor sculptures for the campus of Western Washington University, which—going on a quarter-century—is starting to look distinctly world-class.
