New Whitney: Come for the View, Stay for the Art
After four years of construction and $422 million, the Whitney Museum of American Art is back in downtown Manhattan.
But the homecoming is to a very different downtown than the one where sculptor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney established the museum in 1931, on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village.
The Whitney’s new building, designed by Italian architect Renzo Piano, sits just south of the High Line, the elevated park that attracts six million visitors a year — and now one of the most prestigious spots in Manhattan.
The museum is different, too. The new building’s total area is 220,000 square feet, three times larger than the Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue at 75th Street. There are 50,000 square feet of interior exhibition space, and 13,000 square feet of outdoor galleries and terraces.
Soterios Johnson walked the new Whitney with two critics, WNYC’s art critic Deborah Solomon and architecture critic James Russell. Here are some of the highlights of their impressions:
Russell on the building from the outside: “It’s a bit of a train wreck, a mash-up of a lot of shapes, materials and forms, has a bit of a laboratory quality to it.”
Solomon on the building inside: “I think anybody who likes light, and who likes air and who likes life itself has to applaud this new building, which is so full of wonderful spaces. Does all artwork benefit from the wealth of light? Not necessarily.”
For example, Arshile Gorky’s “The Artist with His Mother,” the 1936 painting of both the artist and his mother, who endured the Armenian genocide. In the new building, the painting hangs next to a glass wall facing the Hudson River. “It’s a tragic painting, one would have liked it in a more somber setting,” she said.
Russell on the glass walls of the outside galleries: “It’s inviting and accessible,” he said. “It gives the museum the chance to introduce people to art and hopefully they will see something that just stops them dead and say: This really means something to me.”
Solomon on the opening exhibit, with highlights from the Whitney’s collection, “America is Hard to See.”
“It has pulled out a lot of very interesting paintings that I don’t recall ever seeing at the Whitney before, and it’s great to see them.”
Russell on the size and flexibility of the galleries. “They can use it in many ways. They can open up those 18,000-square-foot, completely column-free spaces on the fifth floor and put a couple of giant sculptures in it, and everyone will just go, wow. Or they can cut it up and do a lot of tiny galleries and fill them with jewel box art. That’s a lot of flexibility.”
Solomon on the abundance of natural light and views. “This light and the terraces kind of pull you outside and say, please come sunbathe, came admire the views,” she said. “I am not sure whether the art will ever really offer the kind of powerful, private moment that we often turn to art for.”
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