William Paley, the mogul who transformed American television, plays a secondary role in Ryan Murphy’s new Hulu series “Feud: Capote vs. the Swans,” but his impact on American museums is anything but minor.
In the Hulu series, Paley lingers in the background while the spotlight focuses on the women author Truman Capote crafted into fictional subjects—Capote called them swans—among them Paley’s wife, Barbara “Babe” Cushing Mortimer.
Beneath the show’s glitz is a more subtle story, the Paley name’s key role in the nascent years of New York’s Museum of Modern Art.
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“One of his associates told me, it was well known Mr. Paley always answered a call from the Museum of Modern Art, even when other matters required his immediate attention,” Richard E. Oldenburg, the museum’s director at the time, recalled in a 1992 catalog entry. In 1937 Paley joined the museum’s board as a trustee. By then, he’d grown a small radio network into the behemoth of Columbia Broadcasting System (CBS) Inc. network, amassing enough wealth to make him valuable to the museum, which was only eight years old and still in need of financial support.
After rising through various high-level positions, Paley reached a position of immense influence: he deepened the museum’s pockets (which, by 2023, would boast $1.5 billion in assets), oversaw the committee that vetted art acquisitions, and helped build its permanent collection. Later, he assumed the museum presidency, and from 1982 to 1984, oversaw an expansion that effectively doubled the museum’s exhibition space.
Paley gave the museum large sums and valuable works, including Picasso’s Architect’s Table (1912) and, posthumously, Picasso’s Boy Leading a Horse (1905–06). The latter, which demonstrates Picasso’s shift from rose tones to a muted-blue palette, hung in Paley’s Manhattan apartment entrance, noted in a MoMA catalog as “the only room where people remained standing.”
His association with the museum helped bring prestige to Paley’s name, catapulting it near esteemed fellow New Yorkers, those in the Rockefeller and Whitney families. Upon the 1984 unveiling of the new building that Paley had overseen, the New York Times noted, “it is not, to say the least, an institution of outsiders and never has been.”
Among Paley’s other notable gifts were works such as Francis Bacon’s Study for Three Heads, from 1962, a triptych Bacon created after the death of his partner, Peter Lacy. In it, two images of Lacy’s face flank one of Bacon’s.
The works entered the museum’s holding following Paley’s death in 1990. In November 2022, Paley’s deep ties to the museum resurfaced again, when MoMA announced plans to part with $70 million worth of art from his collection at Sotheby’s, a bid to build an endowment for digital projects. It was a sign of changing times; the pandemic had forced even America’s oldest museums to attend to a growing viewership in online forums.
In a catalog note for a 1992 exhibition showcasing Paley’s collection two years after his death, MoMA director emeritus William Rubin recalled that Paley’s acquisitions were personal, guided by “private taste rather than broader public considerations.” Rubin, whom Artforum cast in 2006 as “arguably one of the most important postwar curators of twentieth-century art,” underscored how Paley was following these artists when “there was nothing chic about possessing [them].”