High Museum of Art

The High Museum of Art is a prominent Atlanta cultural institution whose modern white architecture becomes the setting for a major social and artistic confrontation. Its first public exhibition of Wilson Lapeth’s rediscovered work gathers the city’s elite beneath its bright ramps and galleries, but the evening exposes more than Atlanta’s cultural ambitions: it brings Charlie Croker’s financial distress into uneasy proximity with the status he is trying to preserve, while offering Martha Croker a conspicuous return to society.

Setting and Architecture

The museum stands on a knoll at Peachtree and Sixteenth Streets, across from First Presbyterian Church. The contrast is immediate: the church, built in 1919, is described as a dark, stately neo-Gothic structure, while the museum, built in 1983, is white and modern, in the Corbusier mode. Its geometric procession of cubes, cylinders, and other forms extends for roughly half the length of a football field. White pipe railings and the building’s striking shapes make it a visible emblem of Atlanta’s newer cultural self-image.

The museum’s grand atrium magnifies that impression indoors. Almost fifty feet high and nearly as white as the exterior, it is crossed by a curved window wall and a series of rising ramps with white railings and wire grilles. Spotlights and floodlights illuminate the space with an industrial brightness. At the Lapeth opening, the scale and whiteness turn the gathering itself into a spectacle: party clothes, champagne, tables, flowers, and the crowd’s noise fill a room designed to make art and public display impossible to separate.

That architecture also holds older ideas of respectability in view. The exhibition occupies galleries where the museum’s traditional strength had been decorative arts and antique furniture. Major pieces, including the imposing Herter Bed, remain in place while paintings of prison life and male desire take over the walls around them. The museum therefore stages a collision between inherited domestic grandeur and images that its visitors may find difficult to classify or accept.

The Lapeth Exhibition

The exhibition’s importance begins with the scale and circumstances of the discovery. About nine hundred of Wilson Lapeth’s paintings, watercolors, and drawings were found in a bricked-over cold-storage chamber in his mother’s house in Avondale, near Agnes Scott College in Decatur. Lapeth had spent the last years of his life there and died of complications from diabetes in 1935. Much of the rediscovered work concerns homosexual themes; some depicts prison life, and some is highly explicit. A small number of critics, including Hudson Braun of The New York Times, had seen the hidden works before the High Museum of Art arranged to show the collection publicly for the first time.

Lapeth had long been treated as a worthy but minor early Modernist, although he occupied a larger place in Atlanta’s art world, which Joyce Newman describes as short on nationally prominent artists. The discovery and exhibition quickly made him a subject of national attention. The museum’s board had argued over whether to present the show. The account given to Martha Croker connects the decision to Atlanta’s fear of being judged provincial: after the Olympics, the city wanted to appear sophisticated and international, and its leaders feared that rejecting the exhibition would leave a New York museum to claim it instead.

The paintings make that civic calculation tangible. In one gallery, Charlie Croker sees Arrangement in Red Clay, a 1923 image of two white prisoners in a ditch beneath armed deputies. Other large works show prisoners in a chain gang or a jail yard. From the atrium, the exhibition’s scale and subject matter can appear as part of an extravagant gala; deeper in the galleries, the relative quiet and close attention to individual paintings make their explicit bodies harder to dismiss as background decoration. The museum’s rooms thus produce different kinds of looking: the noisy public crowd below and the silent, unsettled viewers among the works above.

Opening Night and Social Display

The opening takes place on an evening in May, with Atlanta’s socially prominent guests filling the atrium. Champagne arrives on trays carried by servers wearing Colonel Popover’s familiar mint-green bow ties. The reception’s theatrical brightness, formal clothes, and abundant flowers create the appearance of effortless civic celebration, even as attendance and spending function as visible measures of standing.

For Martha Croker, the event is a deliberate return to society after her marriage to Charlie has ended. She pays $20,000 for a table and invites nine guests. Her preparation is itself an investment in being seen: she wears a black silk taffeta dress and a ruby necklace, and has spent heavily on her hair, makeup, shoes, and fitness. Joyce Newman arranges an escort and helps shape the company around her. Martha recognizes Arthur Lomprey, the president of PlannersBanc, from earlier dinners during Charlie’s efforts to secure financing for Croker Concourse. His presence turns the opening into a point of contact between social life and the business world from which Martha’s former marriage had once given her access.

Charlie’s place at the museum is more conflicted. He has also bought a whole table, at a cost of $20,000, and is painfully aware of what the expenditure signifies while his finances are failing. Looking down from the balcony at the dinner tables, he imagines that his body announces bankruptcy and fraud to the people around him. A gathering that could once have confirmed his status now exposes the gap between the public performance of wealth and his changed circumstances. The fact that he and Martha both appear at the same opening, each negotiating visibility in a different way, gives the museum a role in their changing social lives as well as their separate encounters with the city’s elite.

Charlie Croker’s Confrontation with the Art

Charlie initially searches the faces around him for confirmation that his shock at Lapeth’s work is shared. Serena Croker studies Arrangement in Red Clay without turning to him, while other guests remain quiet. He is especially unsettled by seeing a Baptist deacon examining the paintings with the same apparent seriousness as Serena. The familiar furniture and conventions of the museum do not support the moral response he expects from the crowd; instead, the audience’s silence leaves him uncertain whether he is out of step or whether other visitors are merely keeping their objections to themselves.

He breaks that silence by loudly describing the two men in Arrangement in Red Clay in vulgar terms. The remark draws sidelong looks, but the crowd gradually turns back to the painting and treats Charlie as if he has behaved like a child in church. The moment is a reversal: a wealthy man accustomed to commanding attention finds that the museum’s audience will not grant him the authority to define what it is seeing. His protest briefly makes him conspicuous, but it does not redirect the exhibition or the evening.

Later, the museum’s new director addresses the crowd from a podium. He explains that the museum was originally founded by Caroline High in her house, on the very site where the guests are assembled, and that she knew Lapeth. He frames Lapeth’s hidden sexual identity not as the secret of the work but as the condition under which an artist felt compelled to conceal the source of his genius. The director also presents society’s repression of gay artists as a continuing failure. Charlie hisses at the speech, yet the audience responds with routine ceremonial applause. The divergence between his open resistance and the crowd’s polite reception makes the museum a site where cultural change is publicly articulated without requiring every member of the audience to welcome it.

Cultural and Financial Significance

The High Museum of Art links civic reputation, philanthropy, social belonging, and business. Charlie remembers that he or Croker Global contributed $100,000 toward the museum’s new building. He also thinks of his $5 million gift to Georgia Tech, and briefly imagines asking the university to return part of it now that he needs money. He abandons the thought, fearing the humiliation of appearing desperate. His past donations have helped establish him as a major benefactor, but they cannot be readily converted into relief when his financial position changes.

The opening makes that contradiction visible. Charlie tries to maintain his public bearing at an event whose expense he can no longer comfortably absorb, while Martha spends heavily to make her own return to the social world unmistakable. In the aftermath, Raymond Peepgass tells her that Charlie’s apparent ease at the museum was an act and points to the $20,000 table as evidence that he still refuses to show how serious the crisis has become. Martha, remembering that Charlie once recovered after repaying creditors only twenty cents on the dollar, suggests that he may believe himself immune to another collapse. The museum is not the cause of the financial conflict, but its gala provides a stage on which wealth’s social performance and its underlying vulnerability meet.

The exhibition also tests Atlanta’s claim to sophistication. The city’s leaders support a show they might otherwise have resisted because they fear being branded provincial; the crowd then gathers beneath modern white architecture to celebrate the very work that has provoked debate. The High Museum of Art thus serves as more than a backdrop. Its building, collection, opening-night rituals, and contested reception concentrate the book’s concerns with status, public identity, cultural change, and the uneasy distance between appearing secure and being so.