ABSTRACT
I f SoHo artists had patrons offering a regular allowance, theydidn’t say. I doubt if any did, because private support of talented individuals was no longer important to very wealthy people-no longer was patronage per se something about which they could significantly boast. (The last example known to me of an artist to receive support for several years from a single person is a poet born in 1929.) Some artists had parents who purchased SoHo property, especially after they had given up on their dream of children pursuing bourgeois lives. Some inherited trust funds that were established before they became artists. In my observation, not until a later generation, say those born after 1960, did wealthy parents gladly give money to their children to become full-time artists or writers. (The exceptions, not surprisingly, were those from patrician backgrounds, such as Robert Motherwell [1914-1991] and George Plimpton [b. 1926].) A few of my neighbors have spouses earning enough income to support an artist, such as Ann Fallert, whose husband Whitman Knapp was a prominent federal judge. Some ex-spouses or ex-lovers were sugar daddies, continuing to invest in a genius who had once given them personal pleasure. Whenever one of these artists had a retrospective exhibition, someone would inevitably notice that most of the works were lent by a single collector.
