Whitney Museum of American Art

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Whitney Museum of American Art, 2015

The Whitney Museum of American Art in the New York borough of Manhattan exhibits one of the most important collections of American art of the 20th and 21st centuries. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded the museum in 1931 with around 700 works of art that she owned. Its mission is described as "collecting, exploring, explaining and questioning" American art with an emphasis on living, contemporary artists.

building

Former building on Madison Avenue, 2010

The museum's first location was on 8th Street in Greenwich Village . There the museum first opened to the public in 1931. In 1954 the museum moved to 54th Street, not far from the Museum of Modern Art . In 1966, the company moved to the new building planned by Marcel Breuer and Hamilton P. Smith on Madison Avenue . The building is characterized by its step-shaped facade made of large gray granite stones and the outward-facing windows. The museum opened on May 1, 2015 in a new building designed by Renzo Piano in the Meatpacking District of Manhattan . The estimated construction costs amounted to 680 million US dollars . The previous Breuer building will be taken over by the Metropolitan Museum of Art .

collection

The museum exhibits paintings , drawings , prints , sculptures , installations , video art and photographs . Every two years the Whitney Biennale provides information on the current state of the American art scene in a large-scale and internationally acclaimed exhibition. In 1978 the exhibition " New Image Painting " started the art movement of the same name.

The permanent collection includes more than 18,000 works of art by over 2,800 artists (as of 2011). The Whitney Museum provides an online database for indexing.

The artists represented include Josef Albers , Alice Aycock , Thomas Hart Benton , Louise Bourgeois , Charles Burchfield , Alexander Calder , Ron Davis , Stuart Davis , Richard Diebenkorn , Arthur Dove , William Eggleston , Gabriele Evertz , Helen Frankenthaler , Arshile Gorky , Keith Haring , Grace Hartigan , Marsden Hartley , Robert Henri , Eva Hesse , Hans Hofmann , Edward Hopper , Jasper Johns , Franz Kline , Willem de Kooning , Lee Krasner , Ronnie Landfield , John Marin , Agnes Martin , Knox Martin , Joan Mitchell , Robert Motherwell , Louise Nevelson , Barnett Newman , Kenneth Noland , Albert Pinkham Ryder , Jackson Pollock , Maurice Prendergast , Robert Rauschenberg , Man Ray , Mark Rothko , Morgan Russell , John Sloan , Cindy Sherman , Kiki Smith , Anne Truitt , Andy Warhol .

The museum preserves the entire estate of Edward Hopper's widow Josephine Verstille Nivison with over 3,100 works.

In June 2018 the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation donated around half of its holdings to the Whitney Museum, with around 400 works by the pop art artist. The Whitney thus holds by far the largest Lichtenstein collection, comparable only to its position in relation to the work of Edward Hopper.

Exhibitions

  • 2015: America Is Hard to See .

Web links

Commons : Whitney Museum of American Art  - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jerry Saltz: The New New Museum , Vulture.com, April 19, 2015
  2. ^ JM: Whitney Museum, New York. Here we go. In: FAZ , June 17, 2010, page 36.
  3. ↑ Hannes Stein: Ocean liner on a long journey in the middle of New York Renzo Piano has built a new house for the Whitney Museum in New York. The old one was too ugly and too small. There is now enough space in the piano building for American art. Die Welt, April 28, 2015
  4. ↑ New York Times: Whaam! Pow! Lichtenstein Foundation Starts to Wind Down With Big Gifts , June 6, 2018

Coordinates: 40 ° 46 '23.7 "  N , 73 ° 57' 50.6"  W.