Samuel "Sam" Adams Green (born Samuel McGee Green; May 20, 1940 – March 4, 2011) was an American curator, art dealer, and arts administrator. He was an early advocate of Pop art and served as director of the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and as a cultural adviser to New York City mayor John Lindsay. Green had notable friendships with artists and cultural figures including Andy Warhol, Cecil Beaton, John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Greta Garbo. He devoted much of his career to the preservation of historic and sacred sites, and he founded the Landmarks Foundation in 1997.
Early life Samuel McGee Green was born in Boston, Massachusetts on May 20, 1940. Green would later go by Samuel Adams Green and claim to be a descendant of Samuel Adams, one of the Founding Fathers of the United States.
Green grew up in an academic environment and developed an early interest in art and architecture. His father, Samuel Magee Green, served as director of the New England Historical Society and as dean of fine arts at Wesleyan University. His cousin was Philadelphia art collector Henry Plumer McIlhenny. He attended the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence, but left after three semesters and moved to New York City, where he began working in the city's contemporary art galleries.
Art career
Early career At the age of 22, Green was introduced to the avant-garde art dealer Richard Bellamy, owner of the Green Gallery on 57th Street. Bellamy was amused by the coincidence of their surnames and hired Green to work at the gallery's front desk in 1963.
In 1963, artist Andy Warhol, visited the Green Gallery and mistook him for a member of the gallery owner's family because of their shared surname. The encounter began a friendship that continued throughout Warhol's career. Green recognized the potential of Warhol's emerging Pop art and subsequently became an important advocate for his work, while Warhol gained access through Green to collectors and members of New York's social and cultural circles. Around this time, Green appeared in Warhol's experimental films Batman Dracula (1964) and Soap Opera (1964).
Green also became acquainted with collectors Burton and Emily Tremaine, through whom he gained access to works by leading contemporary artists. After less than six months at the Green Gallery, Green arranged the loan of more than 50 contemporary artworks for an exhibition at the Davison Art Center at Wesleyan University in 1964. Through the influence of his father, Green secured the exhibition space and installed works by artists including Tom Wesselmann and Yayoi Kusama. Wesselmann's Great American Nude #39 was displayed above a Boston sideboard, while Kusama's Ten Guest Table, a dining table and chairs covered with phallic forms, replaced the Regency furniture normally displayed in the room.
Institute of Contemporary Art In 1964, Green became director of the Institute of Contemporary Art (ICA) at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. That year he organized a major survey of Warhol's work, held from October 8 to November 21, 1965. The exhibition is notable for being Warhol's first solo museum exhibition. Green promoted the show as a large-scale cultural event, distributing thousands of invitations featuring Warhol's S&H Green Stamps. On the opening night, Warhol and his superstar Edie Sedgwick were mobbed by frenzied crowd and had to be helped out of the building.
Green wrote the foreword to John Rublowsky's 1965 book Pop Art, in which he described the movement as a "valued expression of our time."
After three years, in 1967 having been refused permission to organize a campus wide sculpture exhibition at the University of Pennsylvania, Green "abandoned the philistines" and created an exhibition in Philadelphia that included works by Barnett Newman, Tony Smith, and Philip Johnson. The resultant success allowed him to return to New York City's art scene as an acknowledged master of contemporary art installation.
New York cultural adviser After leaving the ICA, Green was appointed a cultural adviser to New York City mayor John Lindsay. In October 1967, Green and Doris Freedman organized and curated Sculpture in Environment, an outdoor group exhibition of sculpture in public parks and plazas throughout New York City. The exhibition included Placid Civic Monument, Claes Oldenburg's first outdoor public monument, installed beside the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The conceptual performance involved a crew of gravediggers excavating a 6-by-3-foot rectangular hole in the ground.
Among his projects was the presentation of a monumental moai head from Easter Island in the plaza of the Seagram Building in Manhattan in 1968. Green worked with the International Fund for Monuments and sought to use the exhibition to draw attention to the preservation of Easter Island's archaeological heritage.
Green was also involved in the New York presentation of Barnett Newman's Broken Obelisk, as part of the city's Sculpture and Environment program. His public-art projects reflected his interest in combining contemporary art with architecture, urban space, and historic preservation.
Green "retired" from the modern art scene in 1970, at the age of 30. Thereafter, he concentrated on cultivating relationships with celebrities and members of the European aristocracy.
Preservation work Beginning in the 1970s and increasingly during the final decades of his life, Green became involved in the preservation of historic monuments and sacred sites. He worked to preserve various ancient art installations around the world, including Bhutanese monasteries and Buddhas carved in the mountainsides of Sri Lanka. To expand and sustain his work, in 1997 Green established the Landmarks Foundation, by the time of his death one of America's leading organizations for historic preservation.
In 1997, Green established the Landmarks Foundation, an organization devoted to the preservation of historic and sacred sites. His preservation work represented a continuation of his earlier interest in placing art and architecture in public settings. In 2007, Greed said: "The work I do now is not a reaction against a life spent mixing with the rich, it is a continuation of it. I put all the contacts I have made in my career to good use."
Personal life Green was known for his extensive friendships with artists, entertainers, and other prominent figures. Guy Trebay of The New York Times wrote: "Of all his varied roles, Mr. Green is likely to be best remembered as a social adventurer, a collector of people who approached the wealthy and famous with the ardor of a lepidopterist wielding a butterfly net." Andy Warhol similarly wrote in his diary: "Sam Green was in everybody's life, such a big part—he's had Yoko Ono and John Lennon and Cecil Beaton and Greta Garbo and me."
Cecil Beaton In 1966, Green met British photographer Cecil Beaton through his cousin Henry Plumer McIlhenny, and subsequently became his traveling companion. In 1970, Green and Beaton travelled to Peru and Bolivia on a trip organized by Braniff International Airways, as Beaton began researching a book about his aunt, Jessie Suarez, later published as My Bolivian Aunt (1971). Later that year, Beaton joined Green in Paris before they travelled through the Dordogne region of France.
Through Beaton, Green became acquainted with members of European aristocratic and social circles. In late summer 1973, Beaton returned to Padua with Green to visit Countess Diana Phipps. They also traveled through Tuscany and attended the Volpi Ball in Venice, where guests included Audrey Hepburn, Andy Warhol, Helmut Berger, Bianca Jagger, Diana Vreeland, and Serge Lifar. In February 1974, Beaton traveled to Mexico and later Guatemala with Green. Green and interior designer Suzie Frankfurt interviewed Beaton at the Pierre Hotel in New York for the April 1978 issue of Interview.
Green described his friendship with Beaton as follows: "I adored his company and didn't care about the obvious conclusions. I revelled in his eruditeness, doted on his considering of who I actually was and what I might become. It was a mythical bachelor uncle handsome euphemistic nephew-type situation but (as far as I perceived) neither romantic nor sexual. Not that that wouldn't have been OK, but it wasn't; so that's not the correct conclusion. Fact is, Cecil never made a move on me."
Barbara Baekeland In 1969, Green had a brief relationship with socialite Barbara Daly Baekeland, the wife of Brooks Baekeland, heir to the Bakelite fortune. Baekeland became intensely attached to him; on one occasion, she reportedly walked barefoot across Central Park in the snow wearing only a lynx coat to demand entry to his apartment. In 1972, she was stabbed to death by her son, Antony Baekeland, at a flat in Cadogan Square, London. Baekeland named Green as executor of her estate, and he was contacted by authorities in England regarding the case.
The murder was dramatized in the 2007 film Savage Grace, in which Julianne Moore portrayed Barbara and Hugh Dancy portrayed Green. Green praised Dancy's performance and resemblance to him but objected to the film's portrayal of his sexuality and its depiction of him engaging in a ménage à trois with Barbara and Antony, calling it "untrue and a slur." He subsequently took legal action against the filmmakers, which remained unresolved at the time of his death.
Candy Darling Green met transgender actress Candy Darling in 1969, when he arranged Cecil Beaton's photoshoot with Andy Warhol at the Factory for Beaton's exhibition 600 Faces by Beaton 1928–69 at the Museum of the City of New York. The resulting photographs include Darling and several other Warhol superstars. Green initially found Darling unattractive, "looking like a man in drag," but noticed that Warhol treated her with particular attention. In April 1969, Women's Wear Daily reported that Green's membership at Raffles, a private dining club, had been revoked after his guests, Ultra Violet and Darling, began dancing together.
In 1971, Green and Darling appeared in the Jackie Curtis's play Vain Victory: The Vicissitudes of the Damned at La MaMa Experimental Theatre Club in Manhattan's East Village. Green was struck by Darling's transformation into a glamorous stage persona. He began courting her "in movieland, in fantasy," later recalling, "She already made it seem a little bit as if I were Sir Laurence Olivier and she was Marilyn Monroe." Green encouraged Darling's ambitions to become a major film and Broadway star. He also arranged a screening of Women in Revolt at Wesleyan University, where the ticket-sale proceeds provide Darling with financial support.
In 1972, Darling began staying at Green's duplex near Lincoln Center at 14 West 68th Street, occupying a separate apartment on the first floor. Green helped pay for her expenses, including dental bills and other necessities. During one of Green's trips out of town, his housekeeper Manuel changed the locks and refused to let him into the apartment once he returned. The incident occurred shortly after the death of Barbara Baekeland, with whom Green had previously had an affair. Green dismissed Manual, whom he said had become preoccupied with witchcraft. After Darling later became ill, she believed that Manual had placed a curse on her.
Darling sometimes referred to Green as her "husband" and implied that they were a couple, although Green had not intended for her to become a permanent resident. She temporarily left his apartment when his sister came to visit during the summer of 1973. Shortly after, Green asked Darling to move out because her dog was not housebroken and repeatedly made messes and damaged things in the apartment.
Greta Garbo