Whitney Museum of American Art - History

History

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, the museum's namesake and founder, was herself a well-regarded sculptor as well as a serious art collector. As a patron of the arts, she had already achieved some success as the creator of the "Whitney Studio Club," a New York–based exhibition space which she created in 1918 to promote the works of avant-garde and unrecognized American artists. With the aid of her assistant, Juliana Force, Whitney had collected nearly 700 works of American art, which she offered to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1929, but the museum declined the gift. This, along with the apparent preference for European modernism at the recently opened Museum of Modern Art, led Whitney to start her own museum, exclusively for American Art, in 1929. In 1931, architect Noel L. Miller converted three row houses on West 8th Street in Greenwich Village – one of which had been the location of the "Studio Club" – to be the museum's home as well as a residence for Whitney. Force became the first director of the museum, and under her guidance, the museum concentrated on displaying the works of new and contemporary American artists.

In 1954, the museum left its original location and moved to a small structure behind the Museum of Modern Art. In 1961 the museum began seeking a site for a larger building. The Whitney settled in 1966 at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue at 75th Street in Manhattan's Upper East Side. The present building, planned and built 1963–1966 by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith in a distinctively modern style, is easily distinguished from the neighboring townhouses by its staircase façade made from granite stones and its external upside-down windows.

From 1973 to 1983 the Whitney operated its first branch at 55 Water Street, in a building owned by Harold Uris who gave the museum a lease for $1 a year. In 1983 Philip Morris installed a Whitney branch in the lobby of its Park Avenue headquarters. In 1981 the museum opened an exhibition space in Stamford, Connecticut, that was housed in Champion International Corporation. In the late 1980s, the Whitney entered into arrangements with Park Tower Realty, I.B.M. and the The Equitable Life Assurance Society of the United States, setting up satellite museums with rotating exhibitions in the lobbies of their buildings. Each museum had its own director, and all plans were to be approved by a Whitney committee.

In order to secure additional space for the museum’s collections, then-director Thomas N. Armstrong III developed plans for a 10-story, $37.5-million addition to the Whitney’s main building. The proposed addition, designed by Michael Graves and announced in 1985, drew immediate opposition. Graves had proposed demolishing the flanking brownstones down to the 74th Street corner for a complementary addition. After the project gradually lost the support of many of the museum’s trustees, the plans were dropped in 1989. Between 1995 and 1998, the building underwent a renovation and addition by Richard Gluckman. In 2001, Rem Koolhaas was commissioned to submit two designs for a $200 million expansion; plans were dropped again in 2003, causing director Maxwell L. Anderson to resign.

The Whitney is developing a new main building designed by Renzo Piano at the Meatpacking District in lower Manhattan. The new museum on Gansevoort Street will mark the southern entrance to the High Line (New York City) park. Construction began in 2010 and is expected to be completed by 2015. New York restaurateur, Danny Meyer opened Untitled, a restaurant in the museum in March 2011. The space is designed by the Rockwell Group The museum says it needs to raises $720 million for the 200,000-square-foot (19,000 m2) meatpacking building. In May 2011 the Metropolitan Museum of Art announced it had entered into an agreement to occupy the Madison Avenue building for at least eight years starting in 2015 easing the Whitney of the burden of having to finance two large museums.