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Whitney Museum of American Art |
 Woman And Bicycle (1952) Willem de Kooning. |
Whitney Museum of American ArtContents • Preeminent
Museum of 20th century American Art
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Preeminent Museum of 20th century American Art Housed in an imposing black-grey marble building on Madison Avenue, the Whitney Museum has one of the most important holdings of 20th century American art, and is considered to be the preeminent home of twentieth-century and contemporary art of the United States. Its permanent collection consists of more than 18,000 works of painting, sculpture and contemporary media. The Whitney's Annual and Biennial art exhibitions have long been established as definitive displays of the most recent developments in American art. Due to its special focus on works by living artists, the museum has a policy of purchasing top-class works within the year they were created, often well before the artists have achieved widespread recognition. The Whitney's innovative stance is further illustrated by the fact that it was the first New York museum to stage a major showing of a video artist (Nam June Paik, 1982). |
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The Whitney Museum of American Art was founded by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (1875-1942), daughter of the fabulously wealthy railroad magnate Cornelius II Vanderbilt. After her marriage in 1896 to Harry Payne Whitney, a financier and brilliant polo player, she devoted much of her time to fine art, first as a sculptor, then - more importantly as a patron. Indeed, from roughly 1907 until World War II she was the leading buyer and collector of American art. In 1914, she formed the Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village, where she held exhibitions by living American painters and sculptors, many of whom had yet to be recognized. In 1929, she offered her assembly of more than 500 works to the city's Metropolitan Museum of Art, only to have her offer declined. In response to this, and also in part to the Museum of Modern Art's preference for European Modernism, she set up her own museum, dedicated to collecting, interpreting, and exhibiting modern art by American artists. |
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The Whitney Museum of American Art opened to the public in 1931 on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village. It moved to its present building - designed by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith - in 1966. In addition to this main location, The Whitney has also established a unique series of corporate-funded branches in other parts of New York City: including, the Equitable Center at Seventh Avenue and 52nd Street; and at the corporate headquarters of Philip Morris on Park Avenue and 42nd Street. At present, a new satellite museum building, designed by the renowned Italian architect Renzo Piano, is being constructed on Gansevoort St. Scheduled to open in 2012, the building will contain more than 50,000 square-feet of gallery space. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney's daughter, Flora Payne Whitney, has followed in her mother's footsteps. From the latter's death in 1942 until 1974, she was President then Chairman of the museum, afterwards continuing as honorary chairman until her death in 1986. Her daughter, Flora Miller Biddle, succeeded her as museum president until 1985. Acquisitions From 1948 onwards, in response to the growth of fine art in the United States - which had superceded Paris as the world centre of artistic activity - The Whitney started to accept donations and bequests from other sources. Major gifts have included: 2,000 oil paintings, watercolours, drawings, and prints by Edward Hopper, donated by his widow Josephine in 1970; the 1976 Lawrence H. Bloedel Bequest which included works by Georgia O'Keeffe, Milton Avery, Larry Rivers, Charles Demuth, and Charles Sheeler; the 1979 bequest of 850 paintings, oil studies, drawings, and sketches by Reginald Marsh, donated by his widow Felicia Meyer Marsh; and the 1980 donation of about 90 rare works by contemporary artists including Alexander Calder, Arshile Gorky, Louise Nevelson, Georgia O'Keeffe, Robert Rauschenberg, and Ad Reinhardt. Recent major donations have included the 2002 gift of 86 masterpieces of contemporary American art by eminent artists like Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, Roy Lichtenstein, and Andy Warhol. Along the way, the Museum has acquired additional works of interest including Three Flags (1958) by Jasper Johns, as well as his Untitled (1996); Circus (1926-31) by Alexander Calder; The Islands (1979), a suite of twelve paintings by Agnes Martin, considered to be her most important work; an exceptional collection of drawings by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen, among numerous other acquisitions. By 1954, the original 600 works in the permanent collection had grown to about 1,300. By the time the museum moved into the new Breuer building in 1966, it had grown to 2,000. Today the Permanent Collection amounts to roughly 18,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and photographs, by more than 2,600 individual artists. As well as this, the museum's Frances Mulhall Achilles Library maintains a reference collection of 50,000 books and exhibition catalogues, along with some 500 current periodicals and essential reference materials on American 20th and 21st-century contemporary art. Masterpieces from the Whitney Museum of American Art include: - Standing Woman (1912) by Gaston
Lachaise Other Artists Other American artists represented include: Josef Albers, Louise Bourgeois, Charles Burchfield, Dan Christensen, Ronald Davis, Richard Diebenkorn, Arthur Dove, William Eggleston, Helen Frankenthaler, Keith Haring, Grace Hartigan, Eva Hesse, Hans Hofmann, Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Ronnie Landfield, John Marin, Knox Martin, Robert Motherwell, Kenneth Noland, Maurice Prendergast, Man Ray, Mark Rothko, Morgan Russell, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Cindy Sherman, and thousands of others. See also: American Sculptors. Exhibitions |
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