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A noble legacy: soon after the Museum of Modern Art in York was founded, the bequest of Lillie P. Bliss played a crucial role in establishing a permanent collection for the fledgling institution - 1864-1931 - Patrons - Biography
Art in America, Nov, 2003 by Rona Roob
In October 1928, Bliss moved from her house on 37th Street, where there was insufficient light and space to properly hang and show her collection. Since her mother had died five years earlier, she was free to sell the house, move, travel and live as she pleased. She contracted to purchase an apartment in a building being erected at 1001 Park Avenue on the northeast corner at 84th Street. Plans were resolved by July 1929, and in October Bliss moved into an 18-room 11,500-square-foot triplex penthouse with very high ceilings on the 13th, 14th and 15th floors. (31) The "Music Room," as she called it, was in fact a double-storied 20-foot-high spacious gallery, a skylit room 43 feet long and 26 feet wide, with a specially designed lighting system. Over the fireplace hung Cezanne's Bather, with Daumier's Laundress and Cezanne's Chocquet on either side. Other walls were dominated by Modigliani's Anna Zborowska, Picasso's Woman in White, and Cezanne's Pines and Rocks. Cezanne's Still Life with Apples was placed above a large grand piano. Lillie finally had the space to hang her three favorite works, the Daumier and the Cezanne Apples and Pines and Rocks, in one space.
The decor of this area of her apartment reflected an independent-minded woman in touch with her time. The furniture and rugs were custom designed by Jules Bouy, a Frenchman who had come to New York around the time of World War I, in the "art moderne" style that had recently become available to fashion-conscious New Yorkers. The furniture and the flat, ornamental setbacks at the sides of the fireplace mantel were characteristic of Bouy's work and evoke the Art Deco urban architecture of this period. The chairs and sofa were slipcovered and the furniture inlaid and painted. On a freestanding center console sat two small sculptures--a Maillol crouching woman and what appears in photos to be an archaic style Greek figure. Abby Rockefeller, who had begun buying modern works in 1924 and was designing a private gallery space in her own home at this time, wrote to a friend: "Very confidentially I feel that Miss Bliss's gallery, which has lots of lovely pictures, is also full of small elephants in the way of furniture. It all looks so big and clumsy to me." (32) Lillie's boldness was lost on Abby; others, however, thought it unforgettably grand. The rest of the apartment was furnished in a traditional style. The top floor was planned as a separate apartment for the use of the Walter Hampden family when they were in town.
Each room was dominated by Lillie's collection: Cezanne watercolors and Seurat drawings in the entrance foyer and reception room; lithographs by Renoir, Redon, Matisse and Davies, woodcuts by Gauguin, etchings by Picasso and fragments of Coptic and Persian textiles along the corridors. Although Bliss was Davies's principal patron, and she owned hundreds of his works, the only examples hanging in her apartment at the time of her death, aside from a few works on paper in the halls, were three oils and the murals moved from 37th Street, which decorated a small room, proof enough that, although she valued their great friendship and was indebted to him for his advice, she did not exaggerate his artistic importance.
