More than forty years later, Emily came to own the overpowering canvas by Franz Kline called Lehigh (1956).

Starkly black and white, it depicted the equally devastated coal mining fields of Pennsylvania by means of jagged, raw brush strokes.

In 1927 at a coming-out party given by her parents, the beautiful nineteen-year-old debutante with dark, curly hair and soulful eyes was introduced to a German baron named Maximilian Edmund Hugo Wilhelm von Romberg. Sixteen years old, he was extremely handsome with brown hair that he wore slicked back, blue eyes, and a chiseled profile that deserved to be minted into a coin. He was trained in the sports of European nobility—riding and fencing—yet was thoroughly American in his love of everything fast and dangerous.

Emily explained, “After a while, I decided I was really going to be brave and buy a picture which I loved and could not get out of my thought.” Her choice was Georges Braque’s The Black Rose (1927). Braque himself considered The Black Rose to be the triumph of one of his most creative years in painting.

Behind all great art collectors there is usually an eminence grise (whether a dealer, another collector, or an artist) who provides expert advice and guidance, thereby influencing the nature of the collection. When Emily first started collecting in the 1930s, her eminence grise was her close friend and relative A. Everett Austin, Jr. (Chick), director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, whose help she readily acknowledged and deeply appreciated. “I think Chick actually had more influence on me and the kind of direction our collection was taking than anyone.”

Whenever she analyzed the factors that led her towards art in the 1930s, Emily included her interest in philosophy, frequently quoting Aristotle: “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance; for this and not the external mannerism and detail is their reality.”

1937

Emily and Max hired the architect Lutah Maria Riggs to design a home in Montecito to be called Brünninghausen.

Beginning in 1944, Emily shifted her focus to New York City, where she began to concentrate on art collecting. During the six-month period before her marriage to Burton, Emily acquired masterpieces by several well-known Europeans including Piet Mondrian, Joan Miró, Paul Klee, and Wassily Kandinsky.

Following the war, it was a perfect time for the Tremaines to collect art. Besides her visual acuity, Emily had the ability to analyze what she heard and read; Burton had the gut instinct; they both had the means; and the art world had shifted from neutral into high gear, with New York City as its base of operations instead of Paris, although the importance of that shift would only be revealed in hindsight.

Then, as if to prove decisively that her days as a novice collector were over, she acquired the works of a number of highly talented but lesser known American artists, including Stuart Davis, Milton Avery, Harry Bertoia, and Ralston Crawford.

When Emily visited the gallery of Valentine Dudensing in 1944, he asked her if she would like to see Mondrian’s last painting, Victory Boogie-Woogie. According to Emily, “I will never forget the impact. I don’t think anything has ever hit me as hard as that. I called Chick [Austin] right away and I said, ‘Chick, you come down here. I’ve seen a picture where every door that Mondrian closed he has opened again. There’s a whole century of inspiration and art and ideas and vision in this thing.’”

Victory Boogie-Woogie, the last painting by Piet Mondrian, was purchased by Emily and Burton, with each paying half of the purchase price. In the same way, they also acquired Woman with a Fan by Pablo Picasso.

It was during this period that Emily came to see herself and Burton not as passive collectors adorning their walls solely for their own pleasure, but as catalytic patrons who could strengthen the bond between architecture and art in the United States. To help achieve this, she decided to mount a nationwide touring exhibition of the Tremaine collection under the name of Burton’s firm, the Miller Company.

In December, the exhibition Painting Toward Architecture opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut. Over the next two years, it traveled to galleries, colleges, and museums in at least 24 cities.

The Painting Toward Architecture exhibition would not have been particularly noteworthy had it been the Tremaines’ only major effort to become patrons of the arts and architecture during this period. However, they went one step further and decided to commission architects to design buildings that would embody the confluence of art and architecture. In one year, 1947–48, they hired five: Lutah Maria Riggs, Buckminster Fuller, Oscar Niemeyer, Frank Lloyd Wright, and Philip Johnson.

The renowned art dealer Leo Castelli once said that a real art collector is very rare. “There are many people who only buy paintings until they run out of wall space. The real collector goes on buying irrespective.” If wall space were the limiting factor in purchasing art, the Tremaines would have quit by the mid-1950s, at which point they had surpassed even the limits of their newly renovated barn in Madison, Connecticut.

“It’s a fascinating thing to understand people who live with art. If you have art in your life, it is a powerful force that can be too much for some people. But Emily had learned how to live with art, how to live with that force,” said the artist, Richard Tuttle.

The Tremaines began to shift their interest to what was happening on the edge of the art world, growing less and less conservative as the years went by. However, there were always precursors to the new works in their collection. For example, their interest in kinetic sculpture, which they started to collect in the 1950s, arose naturally from their pleasure in the Calder mobiles they had acquired in the 1940s.

Once Emily was asked how living with art had affected her thinking and attitude toward life. She replied that even though she had found qualities in artists such as Mondrian that had made her more aware of certain values, the influence was principally the other way around. “My attitude towards life, my thinking and my philosophy have influenced the collection.”

According to Johns, Leo Castelli told the Tremaines “that Tango was the only thing available after my show, which was true. I remember they didn’t believe him and subsequently came to my studio.” On that trip, they saw the unfinished Three Flags and instantly wanted it. Recalled Emily, “I sensed immediately upon seeing Three Flags that it was a great new invention.”

In the final analysis, art collecting was the glue in their marriage. “It brought them both joy, the fun of the hunt, getting up in the morning and having something to do together, to be all embroiled in what was going on in the art world and the intrigue with dealers,” concluded John Tremaine, their grandson. “That is what drove them. It kept them both young.”

In 1962, the Tremaines purchased fifteen works from Andy Warhol before he even had a regular dealer. By so doing, they helped fuel his meteoric rise. Pop was not really new. It hadmany artistic antecedents. What was new was the speed at which it crossed the line to respectability. This was not brought about by dealers or museums. It was brought about by private collectors. And the Tremaines would be the leaders of the pack.

Emily said, “We made several visits to Andy’s studio and came to think of both Andy and his work as perhaps the most enigmatic and complex of any of the artists we were beginning to know.” Warhol was so thankful [for their support] that one Christmas morning he left leaning against their door a small gold Marilyn Monroe as a present.

From Emily’s personal standpoint, the most powerful reason that Pop had died so soon was that it had turned from playful to sardonic; it had moved from aesthetic comment to social criticism. When James Elliot, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, consulted with Emily about the wisdom of buying one of Warhol’s electric-chair paintings for the museum, she was adamantly opposed; the painting was altogether too dismal.

Although Emily moved the art around a great deal, as old works were loaned and new works acquired, her goal always was to achieve resonance across time, space, and style. Asked once what it was like to live in the midst of such visual intensity, Emily said simply that it was like living with books. “I never sit in front of art that I don’t get ideas, It’s a catalyst.”

Agnes Gund, who eventually became president of the Museum of Modern Art, benefited from Emily’s guidance when she first became interested in art. She felt indebted to Emily for taking her to artists’ studios, teaching her to look at art herself, and encouraging her to get to know the artists personally. Once she told Emily how much she admired their painting by Rothko and remarked she wished she could acquire a Rothko. Without hesitation, Emily said, “Let’s go to Rothko’s studio.” Gund concluded, “She really did care and know the artists. I think I would have never had the richness of my life without her example.”

According to the artist, Neil Jenney, “Emily wasn’t afraid to spend her money on a nobody. She didn’t need the judgement of other collectors to know the value of an artist’s work. I was a relative nobody when she came to my place the first time. She came with a friend [Agnes Gund] one day to my small gallery space. I left them alone to look at the paintings, hoping they’d write out a check. When I came out and saw what she had chosen, I remember thinking, My God, Emily always chooses the best painting.”

Among the young artists the Tremaines found fascinating was Christo. Their purchase of Double Store Front at a time when few people were buying his work was of great importance to him. He explained, “Double Store Front was about urban architectural spaces, and it preceded my work with covering things. Mrs. Tremaine was not a fashionable collector. She was a fine collector. She was a passionate collector, and passionately collecting art is an extremely private business.”

As the value of their paintings continued to escalate, Emily admitted to a sense of satisfaction that went beyond aesthetics: “I recall Esquire magazine once suggested that a collector has one of three motives for collecting. A genuine love of art; the investment possibilities; or its social promises. I have never known a collector who was not stimulated by all three. For the full joy and reward, the dominant motivation must be the love of art; but I would question the integrity of any collector who denied an interest in the valuation the marketplace puts on his pictures.”

Emily said in an interview that she had no plans to keep the collection intact after her death because she couldn’t bear the idea of the work being shut up in some museum storage area. To her it was a living thing; better a life on the walls of a private collector than death in storage. According to Tracy Atkinson, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, Emily “looked on the paintings as her children.”

A touchstone is a stone that indicates the purity of gold that is brought into contact with it. Victory Boogie-Woogie was the touchstone of the Tremaine collection. Against it, every other work of art was assayed. If it was pure, it stayed; if it was impure, it was donated or sold. After Emily’s death in 1988, negotiations continued with Larry Gagosian on behalf of S. I. Newhouse to buy the painting. Burton Jr. said, “Then along came an offer from Newhouse on the Victory Boogie-Woogie for $11,000,000.”

Following the two successful auctions at Christie’s of the Tremaine collection in 1988 and 1991, Tracy Atkinson, director of the Wadsworth Atheneum, wrote what amounted to a benediction for the paintings: “They formed a wonderful ensemble which will not be seen again, but that is in the nature of things and indeed it has been very much in the nature of this collection which has waxed and waned in both size and scope over the years as new developments came along in the art world, and as the Tremaines ‘traded up’ towards that extraordinary standard of quality which they set for themselves from the very first.”