been her way of “tactfully negotiating the tensions” between her public ambitions and her private life. 260 The daughter of a wealthy textile merchant who served as a member of President McKinley’s cabinet, Bliss remained single throughout her life and lived with her conventional parents. They did not approve of her artistic taste and insisted she keep the bulk of her collection out of sight in a separate room. 261 However, word of her collection not only spread around New York but also in Europe. In 1922 noted art dealer Germain Seligman wrote Bliss that he had heard of her collection and would like to see it. 262 When she received such requests, Bliss would hire a man from the Macbeth Gallery to bring the works down from storage one at a time and place them on an easel for viewing. 263 Macleod suggests that her parents’ bias against modern art only strengthened Bliss’s resolve to collect such works. 264 Bliss also had a keen interest in music and, had she not shunned public performance, could have been a professional pianist. Her interest in music led to her patronage of musicians, particularly the Kneisel Quartet, a pioneering chamber music group that performed works by both European masters and contemporary American composers. In 1907, when financial problems nearly forced the group to disband, Bliss saved the day by guaranteeing them $35,000 a year. 265 Years later, Monroe Wheeler, director of exhibitions and publications at MoMA, recalled asking a former classmate of 260
Tamara L. Follini, “Lillie Bliss (1864-1931): An Independent Collector,” in Power Underestimated, 189. Rona Roob, “A Noble Legacy,” Art in America, November 2003, 78. 262 Seligman to Bliss, Archives of American Art, The Smithsonian Institution, accessed June 21, 2013, http://www.aaa.si.edu/collections/container/viewer/Bl--286522. 263 Sharon Zane, “Interview with Elizabeth Bliss Parkinson Cobb,” The Museum of Modern Art Oral History Program, July 6, 1988, 2, accessed September 21, 2013, http://www.moma.org/docs/learn/archives/transcript_cobb.pdf. 264 Macleod, Enchanted Lives, Enchanted Objects, 158. 265 Andrea Olmstead, Juilliard: a History (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1999), 35. 261
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