Homage to Ambassador Donald Blinken (1925-2022)

By Jason Andrew for the Estate of Jack Tworkov

Note: Over the many years as director and curator of the Estate of Jack Tworkov, I have on many occasions been grateful for the opportunity to visit and speak with Ambassador Blinken. I visited him frequently in the planning of such shows as the first posthumous exhibition of Tworkov’s work in New York at the UBS Art Gallery in 2009 and enjoying lively conversation and dinner with him and his wife Vera in London on the occasion of the Royal Academy’s exhibition Abstract Expressionism in 2016. Earlier that year, Blinken had invited me to River House, where we walked through his apartment studying the many signature art works in his collection. At the end of the visit, he offered me a binder of clippings, letters, and tear sheets from auction house catalogues—an archive of a collector.

Among Tworkov’s earliest loyal patrons was the financier and later Ambassador, Donald Blinken.

Their friendship began in the early 1950s when Tworkov’s studio was located on the second floor of an old storefront on Fourth Avenue. Willem de Kooning had taken the lease on the space, and around 1948 split the floor with Tworkov. At the time, Blinken was living in London, working in retail with Marks & Spencer—his father being the company lawyer. There, Blinken began looking at paintings in the homes of his British friends and “haunted the Tate Gallery,” as Blinken explained in an article for The Financial Times in 2017.[1]

When he returned to New York, Blinken told me that he first looked up Tworkov asking for drawing lessons. Tworkov shared more than just how to sketch the contours of a model with a stick of charcoal. He shared his psychology and philosophy of what it meant to be an artist and moreover, Tworkov introduced Blinken to a cohort of artists including de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Philip Guston (Blinken recalled meeting Rothko at the apartment of the art dealer, André Emmerich in 1956).

Blinken was in his early 30s when he started collecting the New York School. “The artists weren’t like me, just starting to make a mark,” he explained, “they were middle-aged, in mid-career. In the new world capital of contemporary art, these important artists actually enjoyed sharing their ideas with a beginning collector.”[2]

Blue Cradle (1956) was the first painting purchased by Blinken. It was purchased from Tworkov’s solo show at the Stable Gallery in 1957. Blinken would lend the work to the now historic show The New American Painting organized by the Museum of Modern Art that toured eight European countries between 1958-1959. In a letter to curator Dorothy Miller, Blinken advocated for the artist’s inclusion writing, “I am a fairly recent arrival on the scene from the collecting point of view. But during the past few years I have been looking very hard and very often at what’s going on. It seems to me that along with Rothko, Guston, Gottlieb […] Tworkov is producing the finest body of major work.”[3]

In his own words, Blue Cradle became Blinken’s most beloved picture, describing to Tworkov that the painting was a “favorite of all the things I’ve got—the painting I look at the most.”[4]

Tworkov and Blinken shared wonderful letters between themselves that ranged from personal struggles with depression (Tworkov) to traveling woes (Blinken). They of course enjoyed sharing art world gossip. Like the letter Blinken wrote to Tworkov in January 1960:

We were both very touched by your letter and the sentiments it expressed. Needless to say, we feel the same way about you both (and the family). It is surely a lucky accident that we happen to feel as strongly about your painting as well.

[…] I gather from what Friedl told us, plus what I have learned from Ben Heller and Israeli Rosen by letter, that most of the excitement has had to do with the bidding up in price of Pollacks [sic] and De Koonings painted five years ago. The same few pictures being chased by too much money. I also gather that Rothko decided not to let the Four Seasons have his pictures after all, but I don’t know the reason. Do you?[5]

Blinken would spend time with Tworkov in Provincetown and wouldn’t miss an opportunity to visit the studio on West 22nd Street. “It was a great pleasure to get your note as to have you visit the studio,” Tworkov wrote Blinken in January 1963, “I think you appreciate the depth of my feeling towards you. You have made a significant contribution to my life and your moral support added much to my happiness.”[6]

In addition to several gifts from Tworkov of drawings and studies for paintings, Blinken would go on to purchase several other paintings including Transverse (1957-58) which he swept up after its former owner, Ben Heller, offered it for sale following its inclusion in Tworkov’s retrospective at the Whitney Museum in 1964. He purchased his final painting, Q3-73 #3 (1972) in 2006.

Following the legal dispute after Rothko’s death, Tworkov and Blinken served together on the Mark Rothko Foundation. Blinken as its president and Tworkov as a member.

Though the years their desire to share in each other’s company continued. “I have to stay close to home this summer, not moving very far from East Hampton,” Blinken wrote responding to Tworkov’s invitation to come to Provincetown, “We take Anthony [United States Secretary of State from 2021] up to Harvard Friday and are ourselves off to China the end of September. I look forward to seeing you when you get back to the city and telling you all about our trip.”[7]

Tworkov’s eldest daughter, the painter Hermine Ford, remembers Blinken with these words:

Donald Blinken was extremely important to the life of our family starting in the 1950’s. He was an early patron of my father Jack Tworkov’s work. They became very good friends and he remained devoted to my father’s work and career for the rest of his life. I was a downtown bohemian teen-ager when he first came into our lives. He liked to tease me about what he imagined was my conventional teen-age dating life. Donald took painting lessons with my father in his Fourth Avenue studio, where I also liked to hang-out and draw from the model. Donald, as a young businessman, in his perfect ties and suits, and slicked back pomaded hair, seemed happy and bemused to be among us. Soon he married, and he and his first wife, Judith, were by far the most glamorous beings in our orbit. I didn’t see much of him as I grew into my own life, but he was never absent as a Tworkov fan, supporter, giver of sage advice and safe keeper of some very fine paintings.

“Living with art,” Blinken wrote, “has been a pleasure, but the experience of visiting artists’ studios and talking about art—that was an enriching, privileged education.” [8]

About Ambassador Blinken.

In 1966, Blinken co-founded the investment bank EM Warburg, Pincus & Co. He served as President of the Brooklyn Academy of Music from 1970-1976. He was named President of the Mark Rothko Foundation in 1976, a post he held until 1986. He chaired the Board of Trustees of the State University of New York, the nation’s largest institution of higher education from 1978-1990. From 1994-1997, he was ambassador to Hungary. Later, he was awarded the US Department of Defense Award for Distinguished Public Service and was the first US ambassador to receive Hungary’s highest civilian honor. Together with his wife Vera, they provided support to establish the 1956 Hungarian Refugees in the United States special digital collection. They jointly authored their sojourn in the book Vera and the Ambassador: Escape and Return, published in 2009.

[1] Blinken, Donald. “Art collector Donald Blinken remembers all about artists,” The Financial Times, December 1, 2017 http: https://www.ft.com/content/6354418c-d066-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6

[2] Ibid.

[3] Donald Blinken, letter to Dorothy Miller, February 10, 1958, Jack Tworkov papers, 1926-1993. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[4] Donald Blinken, letter to Jack Tworkov, October 17, 1957, Jack Tworkov papers, 1926-1993. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution.

[5] Donald Blinken, letter to Jack Tworkov, January 5, 1960, Jack Tworkov papers, 1926-1993. Archives of American Art, Smithsonian Institution

[6] Jack Tworkov, letter to Donald Blinken, January 9, 1963, Courtesy Tworkov Family Archives, New York.

[7] Donald Blinken, letter to Jack Tworkov, September 3, 1980, Courtesy Tworkov Family Archives, New York.

[8] Blinken, Donald. “Art collector Donald Blinken remembers all about artists,” The Financial Times, December 1, 2017 http: https://www.ft.com/content/6354418c-d066-11e7-9dbb-291a884dd8c6

“We were both very touched by your letter and the sentiments it expressed. Needless to say, we feel the same way about you both (and the family). It is surely a lucky accident that we happen to feel as strongly about your painting as well.”

—Donald Blinken to Jack Tworkov, January 1960