Description of the attraction
The Whitney Museum of American Art is the largest collection of American painting, sculpture, graphics, art installations of the 20th and 21st centuries in the United States. Its collection of more than 19 thousand exhibits is a powerful magnet for the connoisseur of contemporary art.
At the origins of the museum stood the rich, beautiful, talented and incredibly energetic Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney - a sculptor, philanthropist, collector. The great-granddaughter of one of the richest industrialists in US history, Cornelius Vanderbilt, she married for love Harry Payne Whitney, an athlete and heir to the oil empire. The possibilities for this brilliant woman were endless. At the beginning of the 20th century, in Montmartre, Paris, she became acquainted with modern art and tried her hand at sculpture, and quickly achieved success. The money gave her the opportunity to become a philanthropist as well.
In 1918, she established the Whitney Studio Club in Manhattan, which could exhibit young artists. By 1931, she had amassed a significant collection of works by young American masters, and Whitney offered it (along with substantial financial aid) to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. However, Met was in no hurry to agree. And then Gertrude Whitney decided to create her own museum.
The Whitney Museum appeared in 1931, initially on Eighth Street; its collection consisted of about 700 works. It was replenished mainly with works of artists who exhibited their work at the Whitney Biennale, which has become one of the main events in the artistic life of New York. So the museum acquired the works of Edward Hopper, Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline.
The museum acquired its current location on Madison Avenue in the sixties of the last century, when a modernist building was built here for it, designed by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton Smith. However, now seven floors are not enough for the growing collection, and the museum is building a new building for itself in lower Manhattan, due to be completed in 2015.
The collection of the museum includes the works of hundreds of legendary American artists: Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Kenneth Noland, Hans Hoffmann, Louise Bourgeois, Paul Pfeiffer and many other masters. Every two years, it still hosts the Whitney Biennale, an international exhibition that reflects trends in contemporary art - it allows for continuous replenishment of the collection. The museum is also known for supporting non-traditional art: for example, in 1976, live bodybuilders, including the young Arnold Schwarzenegger, demonstrated their bodies against the background of slides with images of the creations of Michelangelo and Rodin.
