[Congressional Record Volume 145, Number 23 (Tuesday, February 9, 1999)]
[Senate]
[Pages S1404-S1405]
From the Congressional Record Online through the Government Publishing Office [www.gpo.gov]




               TRIBUTE TO PAUL MELLON--GIANT OF THE ARTS

 Mr. KENNEDY. Mr. President, America lost one of its greatest 
citizens and greatest patrons of the arts last week with the death of 
Paul Mellon. All of us who knew him admired his passion for the arts, 
his extraordinary taste and insights, and his lifelong dedication to 
our country and to improving the lives of others.
  He was widely known and loved for many different aspects of his 
philanthropy in many states, including Massachusetts. Perhaps his 
greatest gift of all to the nation is here in the nation's capital--the 
National Gallery of Art. The skill and care and support which he 
devoted to the Gallery for over half a century brilliantly fulfilled 
his father's gift to the nation. He made the Gallery what it is today--
a world-renowned museum containing many of the greatest masterpieces of 
our time and all time, a fitting and inspiring monument to the special 
place of the arts in America's history and heritage.
  I believe that all Americans and peoples throughout the world who 
care about the arts are mourning the loss of Paul Mellon. We are proud 
of his achievements and his enduring legacy to the nation. We will miss 
him very much.
  An appreciation of Paul Mellon by Paul Richard in the Washington Post 
last week eloquently captured his philosophy of life and his lifelong 
contributions to our society and culture, and I ask that it be printed 
in the Record.
  The material follows:

                [From the Washington Post, Feb. 3, 1999]

  Appreciation--Paul Mellon's Greatest Gift: The Philanthropist Left 
               Behind a Fine Example of the Art of Living

                           (By Paul Richard)

       Though it never came to anything, Paul Mellon once 
     considered fitting every windowsill in Harlem with a box for 
     growing flowers.
       Mellon understood that Titians were important, that magic 
     was important, that thoroughbreds and long hot baths and 
     kindness were important, that thinking of the stars, and 
     pondering the waves, and looking at the light on the 
     geraniums were all important, too.
       In a nation enamored of the lowest common denominators, 
     what intrigued him were the highest. He spent most of his 
     long life, and a vast amount of money, about $1 billion all 
     in all, buying for the rest of us the sorts of private mental 
     pleasures that he had come to value most--not just the big 
     ones of great art, great buildings and great books, but the 
     little ones of quietude, of just sitting in the sand amid the 
     waving dune grass, looking out to sea.
       He died Monday night at home at Oak Spring, his house near 
     Upperville, Va. Cancer had weakened him. Mellon was 91.
       Twenty-five years ago, while speaking at his daughter's 
     high school graduation, that cheerful, thoughtful, courtly 
     and unusual philanthropist delivered an assertion that could 
     stand for his epitaph:
       ``What this country needs is a good five-cent reverie.
       Mellon's money helped buy us the 28,625-acre Cape Hatteras 
     National Seashore. He gave Virginia its Sky Meadows State 
     Park. In refurbishing Lafayette Square, he put in chess 
     tables, so that there's something to do there other than just 
     stare at the White House. He gave $500,000 for restoring 
     Monticello. He gave Yale University his collection of 
     ancient, arcane volumes of alchemy and magic. He published 
     the I Ching, the Chinese ``book of changes,'' a volume of 
     oracles. And then there is the art.
       I am deeply in his debt. You probably are, too.
       If you've ever visited the National Gallery of Art, you 
     have felt his hospitality. Its scholarship, its graciousness, 
     its range and installations--all these are Mellonian.
       It was Mellon, in the 1930s, who supervised the 
     construction of its West Building, with its fountains and 
     marble stairs and greenhouse for growing the most beautiful 
     fresh flowers. After hiring I.M. Pei to design the East 
     Building, Mellon supervised its construction, and then filled 
     both buildings with art. Mellon gave the gallery 900 works, 
     among them 40 by Degas, 15 by Cezanne, many Winslow Homers 
     and five van Goghs--and this is just a part of his donations. 
     His sporting pictures went to the Virginia Museum of Fine 
     Arts in Richmond, and his British ones to Yale University, 
     where Louis I. Kahn designed the fine museum that holds them.
       At home, he hung the art himself. He never used a measuring 
     tape; he didn't need to. He had the most observant eye.
       ``I have a very strong feeling about seeing things,'' he 
     said once. ``I have, for example, a special feeling about how 
     French pictures ought to be shown, and how English pictures 
     ought to be shown. I think my interest in pictures is a bit 
     the same as my interest in landscape or architecture, in 
     looking at horses or enjoying the country. They all have to 
     do with being pleased with what you see.''
       He would not have called himself an artist, but I would. It 
     was not just his collecting, or the scholarship he paid for, 
     or the museums that he built, all of which were remarkable. 
     Nobody did more to broadcast to the rest of us the profound 
     rewards of art.
       He was fortunate, and knew it. He had comfortable homes in 
     Paris, Antigua, Manhattan and Nantucket, and more money than 
     he needed. His Choate-and-Yale-and-Cambridge education was 
     distinguished. So were his friends. Queen Elizabeth II used 
     to come for lunch. His horses were distinguished. He bred 
     Quadrangle and Arts and Letters and a colt named Sea Hero, 
     who won the Kentucky Derby. ``A hundred years from now,'' 
     said Mellon, ``the only place my name will turn up anywhere 
     will be in the studbook, for I was the breeder of Mill 
     Reef.'' His insistence on high quality might have marked him 
     as elitist, but he was far too sound a character to seem any 
     sort of snob.
       His manners were impeccable. Just ask the gallery's older 
     guards, or the guys who groomed his horses. When you met him, 
     his eyes twinkled. He joked impishly and easily. Once, during 
     an interview, he opened his wallet to show me a headline he 
     had clipped from the Daily Telegraph: ``Farmer, 84, Dies in 
     Mole Vendetta.'' He liked the sound of it.
       There was an if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it spirit to his 
     luxuries. They were well patinaed. His Mercedes was a `68. 
     His jet wasn't new, and neither were his English suits or his 
     handmade shoes. The martinis he served--half gin, half 
     vodka--were 1920s killers. There was a butler, but he shook 
     them himself. He said he'd always liked the sound of ice 
     cubes against silver.
       Nothing in his presence told you that Paul Mellon had been 
     miserable when young.
       His childhood might easily have crushed him. His father, 
     Andrew W. Mellon--one of the nation's richest men and the 
     secretary of the Treasury--had been grim and ice-cube cold.
       Paul Mellon loved him. It could not have been easy. ``I do 
     not know, and I doubt anyone will ever know,'' he wrote, 
     ``why Father was so seemingly devoid of feeling and so 
     tightly contained in his lifeless, hard shell.''
       His parents had warred quietly. Paul was still a boy when 
     their marriage ended coldly, in a flurry of detectives. His 
     sister, Ailsa, never quite recovered. Paul never quite forgot 
     his own nervousness and nausea and feelings of inadequacy. It 
     seems a stretch to use this term for someone born so wealthy, 
     but Paul Mellon was a self-made man.
       Most rich Americans, then as now, saw it as their duty to 
     grow richer. Mellon didn't. When he found his inner compass, 
     and abandoned thoughts of making more money, and said so to 
     his father, he was 29 years old.
       First he wrote himself a letter. ``The years of habit have 
     encased me in a lump of ice, like the people in my dreams,'' 
     he wrote. ``When I get into any personal conversation with 
     Father, I become congealed and afraid to speak. . . . 
     Business. What does he really expect me to do, or to be? Does 
     he want me to be a great financier . . .? The mass of 
     accumulations, the responsibilities of great financial 
     institutions, appall me. My mind is not attuned to it. . . . 
     I have some very important things to do still in my life, 
     although I am not sure what they are. . . . I

[[Page S1405]]

     want to do in the end things that I enjoy. . . . What does he 
     think life is for? Why is business . . . more important than 
     the acceptance and digestion of ideas? Than the academic 
     life, say, or the artistic? What does it really matter in the 
     end what you do, as long as you are being true to yourself?''
       So Mellon changed his life. He gave up banking. He moved to 
     Virginia. He started breeding horses. And then, in 1940, 
     after having spent so many years at Cambridge and at Yale, 
     Mellon went back to school. To St. John's College in 
     Annapolis. To study the Great Books.
       (Mellon later gave more than $13 million to St. John's.)
       His path had been determined. Though deflected by World War 
     II--he joined the cavalry, then the OSS--Mellon would 
     continue on it for the rest of his long life. As his friend 
     the mythologist Joseph Campbell might have put it (it was 
     Mellon who published Campbell's ``The Hero With a Thousand 
     Faces''), Paul Mellon had determined to follow his own bliss.
       He was curious about mysticism, so he studied with Carl 
     Jung. He liked deep, expansive books, so he began to publish 
     the best he could discover. Bollingen Series, his book 
     venture, eventually put out 275 well-made volumes, among them 
     the I Ching, Andre Malraux's ``Museum Without Walls,'' Ibn 
     Khaldun's ``The Muqadimah,'' Vladimir Nabokov's translations 
     from Pushkin, and Kenneth Clark's ``The Nude.''
       Because Mellon liked high scholarship, he started giving 
     scholars money. Elias Caetti, who received his Nobel prize 
     for literature in 1981, got his first Bollingen grant in 
     1985. Others--there were more than 300 in all--went to such 
     thinkers as the sculptor Isamu Noguchi (who was paid to study 
     leisure), the poet Marianne Moore, and the art historian 
     Meyer Schapiro.
       Because Mellon liked poetry, he established the Bollingen 
     Prize for poetry. The first went to Ezra Pound, the second to 
     Wallace Stevens.
       Mellon loved horses. So he started buying horse pictures. 
     He had had a great time at Cambridge--``I loved,'' he wrote, 
     ``its gray walls, its grassy quadrangles, its busy, narrow 
     streets full of men in black gowns . . . the candlelight, the 
     coal-fire smell, and walking across the Quadrangle in a 
     dressing gown in the rain to take a bath.''
       Though America's libraries were full of English books, 
     America's museums were not full of English art. It didn't 
     really count. What mattered was French painting and Italian 
     painting. Mellon didn't care. He thought that if you were 
     reading Chaucer or Dickens or Jane Austen, you ought to have 
     a chance to see what England really looked like. Mellon knew. 
     He remembered. He remembered ``huge dark trees in rolling 
     parks, herds of small friendly deer . . . soldiers in scarlet 
     and bright metal, drums and bugles, troops of gray horses, 
     laughing ladies in white, and always behind them and behind 
     everything the grass was green, green, green.'' So Mellon 
     formed (surprisingly inexpensively) and then gave away 
     (characteristically generously) the world's best private 
     collection of depictive English art.
       He knew what he was doing. As he knew what he was doing 
     when he took up fox hunting, competitive trail riding and the 
     20th-century abstract paintings of Mark Rothko and Richard 
     Diebenkorn.
       He was following his bliss.
       He didn't really plan it that way. He just went for it. 
     ``Most of my decisions,'' he said, ``in every department of 
     my life, whether philanthropy, business or human relations, 
     and perhaps even racing and breeding, are the results of 
     intuition. . . . My father once described himself as a `slow 
     thinker.' It applies to me as well. The hunches or impulses 
     that I act upon, whether good or bad, just seem to rise out 
     of my head like one of those thought balloons in the comic 
     strips.''
       That wasn't bragging. Mellon wasn't a braggart. He wasn't 
     being falsely modest, either. Mellon knew the value of what 
     it was he'd done.
       Mellon was a patriot, a good guy and a gentleman. He had a 
     healthy soul. What he did was this:
       With wit and taste and gentleness, with the highest self-
     indulgence and the highest generosity, he made the lives of 
     all of us a little bit like his.

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