WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection— arguably the finest holdings of twentieth-century American art in the world—is the Museum’s key resource. The Museum’s flagship exhibition, the Biennial, is the country’s leading survey of the most recent developments in American art.

Innovation has been a hallmark of the Whitney since its beginnings. It was the first museum dedicated to the work of living American artists and the first New York museum to present a major exhibition of a video artist (Nam June Paik, in 1982). Such important figures as Jasper Johns, Jay DeFeo, Glenn Ligon, Cindy Sherman, and Paul Thek were given their first comprehensive museum surveys at the Whitney. The Museum has consistently purchased works within the year they were created, often well before the artists who created them became broadly recognized.

ROBERT HENRI (1865-1929), GERTRUDE VANDERBILT WHITNEY

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; GIFT OF FLORA WHITNEY MILLER 86.70.3

FOUNDING

At the beginning of the twentieth century, sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney saw that American artists with new ideas had trouble exhibiting or selling their work. She began purchasing and showing their artwork, eventually becoming the leading patron of American art from 1907 until her death in 1942.

In 1914, Mrs. Whitney established the Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village, where she presented exhibitions by living American artists whose work had been disregarded by the traditional academies. She had assembled a collection of more than five hundred pieces by 1929. After her offer of this gift to the Metropolitan Museum of Art was declined, she set up her own institution, one with a distinctive mandate: to focus exclusively on the art and artists of this country. The Whitney Museum of American Art was founded in 1930, and opened in 1931 on West Eighth Street near Fifth Avenue.

Following a move in 1954 to an expanded site on West 54th Street, the Whitney opened the Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue at 75th Street in 1963. The iconic building housed the Museum from 1966 through October 20, 2014. The Whitney’s current building at 99 Gansevoort Street opened on May 1, 2015.

The Whitney was an innovator in taking its exhibitions and programming beyond its own walls, opening branch museums in other parts of New York City and the surrounding area. These freeof-charge, corporate-sponsored branches operated as standalone spaces with their own staffs, serving as training grounds for curators including Thelma Golden, Shamim Momin, Lisa Phillips, and Debra Singer. The exhibitions and programming at these locations not only allowed the public more access to the Whitney’s collection, but also met the needs of experimental artists by providing large spaces and performance opportunities. The last of the branches closed in 2008.

PERMANENT COLLECTION

The Whitney’s collection includes over 24,000 works created by more than 3,500 artists in the United States during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

At its core are Museum founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s personal holdings, totaling some six hundred works when the Museum opened in 1931. These works served as the basis for the founding collection, which Mrs. Whitney continued to add to throughout her lifetime.

The founding collection reflects Mrs. Whitney’s ardent support of living American artists of the time, particularly younger or emerging ones, including Peggy Bacon, George Bellows, Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Mabel Dwight, Edward Hopper, Yasuo Kuniyoshi, Reginald Marsh, and John Sloan. This focus on the contemporary, along with a deep respect for artists’ creative processes and visions, has guided the Museum’s collecting ever since.

EDWARD HOPPER (1882-1967), (SELF-PORTRAIT), 1925-30 OIL ON CANVAS

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; JOSEPHINE N. HOPPER BEQUEST 70.1165. © 2019 HEIRS OF JOSEPHINE N. HOPPER/LICENSED BY ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

The collection begins with Ashcan School painting and follows the major movements of the twentieth century in America, with strengths in modernism and Social Realism, Precisionism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop art, Minimalism, Postminimalism, art centered on identity and politics that came to the fore in the 1980s and 1990s, and contemporary work. The Museum’s flagship exhibition is its biennial survey of contemporary art, which has always kept the focus on the present in the spirit of its founder. The highlights of the collection are definitive examples of their type, but there is also much variety and originality in works by less well-known figures. The collection includes all mediums; over eighty percent is works on paper. The Whitney has deep holdings of the work of certain key artists, spanning their careers and the mediums in which they worked, including Alexander Calder, Mabel Dwight, Nicole Eisenman, Edward Hopper, Jasper Johns, Glenn Ligon, Brice Marden, Reginald Marsh, Agnes Martin, Georgia O’Keeffe, Claes Oldenburg, Laura Owens, Ed Ruscha, and Cindy Sherman.

GEORGE TOOKER (1920-2011), THE SUBWAY, 1950. TEMPERA ON COMPOSITION BOARD.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK ; PURCHASE WITH FUNDS FROM THE JULIANA FORCE PURCHASE AWARD 50.23. © ESTATE OF GEORGE TOOKER. COURTESY DC MOORE GALLERY, N.Y.

For many vanguard artists in the early twentieth century, music offered a model for expressing nonverbal emotional states and sensations.

ROSALYN DREXLER (B. 1926), MARILYN PURSUED BY DEATH, 1963. ACRYLIC AND SILVER GELATIN PHOTOGRAPH ON CANVAS.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; PURCHASE WITH FUNDS FROM THE PAINTING AND SCULPTURE COMMITTEE 2016.16. © 2019 ROSALYN DREXLER / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK AND GARTH GREENAN GALLERY, NEW YORK

Georgia O’Keeffe was fascinated with what she called “the idea that music could be translated into something for the eye,” but her references to music in the titles of her paintings derived equally from her belief that visual art, like music, could convey powerful emotions independent of representational subject matter.

In Music—Pink and Blue II, the swelling, undulating forms imply a connection between the visual and the aural, while also suggesting the rhythms and harmonies that O’Keeffe perceived in nature.

GEORGIA O’KEEFFE (1887-1986), MUSIC, PINK AND BLUE NO. 2, 1918. OIL ON CANVAS.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, NEW YORK; GIFT OF EMILY FISHER LANDAU IN HONOR OF TOM ARMSTRONG 91.90. © 2019 GEORGIA O’KEEFFE MUSEUM / ARTISTS RIGHTS SOCIETY (ARS), NEW YORK

ROY LICHTENSTEIN STUDY COLLECTION

June 2018 The Whitney Museum of American Art made the announcement that they had received a remarkable promised gift of over 400 works by Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997). The Museum and the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation have forged an agreement that will bring the two organizations into a close and ongoing partnership and will make the Whitney a locus for Lichtenstein scholarship with the creation of the Roy Lichtenstein Study Collection. Through this gift, and an expanded relationship with the Foundation, the Whitney will hold the world’s largest study collection of Lichtenstein’s work, opening up exceptional possibilities for the Museum in terms of exhibition, scholarship, and conservation.

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, SHIPBOARD GIRL ©

ESTATE OF ROY LICHTENSTEIN

ROY LICHTENSTEIN, STILL LIFE WITH PORTRAIT ©

ESTATE OF ROY LICHTENSTEIN

EXHIBITIONS

Since its inception in 1931, the Whitney has championed American art and artists by assembling a rich permanent collection and featuring a rigorous and varied schedule of exhibition programs. Emphasizing seminal artists and artworks from the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, the Museum organizes important exhibitions both from its holdings and from the collections of individuals and institutions worldwide. Exhibitions range from historical surveys and in-depth retrospectives of major twentiethcentury and contemporary artists to group shows introducing young or relatively unknown artists to a larger public. The Biennial, an invitational show of work produced in the preceding two years, was introduced by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1932. It is the longestrunning series of exhibitions to survey recent developments in American art. The Whitney also has presented acclaimed exhibitions of film and video, architecture, photography, and new media.

MUSEUM DIRECTORS

Upon the founding of the Museum, Juliana Force, a close associate of Mrs. Whitney, was named director. Her curatorial staff was composed of three artists: Edmund Archer, Karl Free, and Hermon More. After Force’s retirement in 1948, Hermon More was appointed director and served until his retirement in 1958, when Lloyd Goodrich assumed the position. John I. H. Baur was appointed director in 1968, following Goodrich, and upon the former’s retirement in 1974, Thomas N. Armstrong III became director. David A. Ross was director from 1991 to 1998, and Maxwell L. Anderson assumed the role from 1998 to 2003. Adam D. Weinberg is the current Alice Pratt Brown Director of the Whitney Museum.

WHITNEY MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART

PHOTOGRAPH BY BEN GANCSOS ©2016

THE BUILDING

Designed by architect Renzo Piano, the Whitney’s building in the Meatpacking District includes approximately 50,000 square feet of indoor galleries and 13,000 square feet of outdoor exhibition space and terraces facing the High Line. An expansive gallery for special exhibitions is approximately 18,000 square feet in area, making it the largest columnfree museum gallery in New York City. Additional exhibition space includes a lobby gallery (accessible free of charge), two floors for the permanent collection, and a special exhibitions gallery on the top floor.

Mr. Piano remarked in 2011, “The design for the new museum emerges equally from a close study of the Whitney’s needs and from a response to this remarkable site. We wanted to draw on its vitality and at the same time enhance its rich character. The first big gesture, then, is the cantilevered entrance, which transforms the area outside the building into a large, sheltered public space. At this gathering place beneath the High Line, visitors will see through the building entrance and the large windows on the west side to the Hudson River beyond. Here, all at once, you have the water, the park, the powerful industrial structures and the exciting mix of people, brought together and focused by this new building and the experience of art.”

The dramatically cantilevered entrance along Gansevoort Street shelters an 8,500-square-foot outdoor plaza or “largo,” a public gathering space steps away from the southern entrance to the High Line. The building also includes an education center offering stateof-the-art classrooms; a multi-use black box theater for film, video, and performance with an adjacent outdoor gallery; a 170-seat theater with stunning views of the Hudson River; and a Works on Paper Study Center, Conservation Lab, and Library Reading Room.

A retail shop on the ground-floor level contributes to the busy street life of the area. A ground-floor restaurant, Untitled, and the topfloor Studio Cafe are operated by renowned restaurateur Danny Meyer and his Union Square Hospitality Group.

Mr. Piano’s design takes a strong and strikingly asymmetrical form— one that responds to the industrial character of the neighboring loft buildings and overhead railway while asserting a contemporary, sculptural presence. The upper stories of the building overlook the Hudson River on its west, and step back gracefully from the elevated High Line Park to its east.

ABOUT RENZO PIANO

Renzo Piano was born in Genoa, Italy, in 1937, into a family of builders. In his home city he has strong roots, sentimental and cultural, with its historic center, the port, the sea, and with his father’s trade. During his time at university, the Milan Polytechnic, he worked in the studio of Franco Albini. He graduated in 1964 and then began to work with experimental lightweight structures and basic shelters. Between 1965 and 1970 he traveled extensively in America and Britain. In 1971, he founded the studio Piano & Rogers with Richard Rogers, and together they won the competition for the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the city where he now lives. From the early 70s until the 90s, he collaborated with the engineer Peter Rice, forming Atelier Piano & Rice, between 1977 and 1981. Finally, in 1981, he established Renzo Piano Building Workshop, with a hundred people working in Paris, Genoa, and New York.

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https://whitney.org/

Whitney Museum of American Art

99 Gansevoort Street New York, NY 10014 (212) 570-3600