A New Home for American Art -- Whatever It May Be?

In 1908 Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened the Whitney Studio Gallery on West 8th Street, where she also had her own studio, to showcase the work of her artist friends and her steadily growing collection. By the 20s the Whitney Studio Club, a salon where artists such as John Sloan, William Glackens, and George Luks among others met to discuss, exhibit their work, and drink, was incorporated into the mix.

In 1931 Whitney approached the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an offer to donate her collection of some 700 pieces of modern artworks, and they declined her offer. She then decided to create her own museum, because she could. Needing more space, in 1954 the museum moved uptown to 54th Street and then moved once again in 1966 to a new Marcel Breuer-designed building on Madison Avenue.

On May 1st the Whitney Museum of American Art makes a triumphal return to its roots in the West Village. Unlike its brownstone beginnings, this time it will have 50,000 square feet of indoor exhibition space and 30,000 square feet of exterior space, with amazing views of the Hudson River and Manhattan skyline. Not only will the new Whitney have plenty of room to show off its collection, which now exceeds some 21,000 pieces, but this shiny new space could prompt a reconsideration of the matter of just what American art is. It's a wide-open question and there is a lot of competition from other museums attempting to take on what the Whitney started, by showing American artists, especially living, working artists. The Museum of Modern Art, the New Museum, the Guggenheim, and the stately Met have made strong moves in collecting and exhibiting contemporary art, courting benefactors, and waging the all-important battle for the young audience, with their short attention spans and interactive brains. Even its new neighbors, the big-money Chelsea galleries, have been putting on some impressive museum-quality shows of late.

It's clear as the Whitney opens its new Renzo Piano-designed home in the Meatpacking District, the heart of blue-chip art land, that it's ready to take on the challenge. With its big industrial gallery spaces, soft wood flooring, and expansive exterior spaces, great things can happen here. But will it be fresh, or will it follow a depressing trend of museums showing the same artists who seem to pop up in every exhibit, art fair, and auction house?

The Whitney's inaugural exhibition, America Is Hard to See, is a selection of over 600 works by some 400 artists, spanning the period from about 1900 to the present, all from the museum’s permanent collection, with some well-known works, but also many never shown and several newly acquired. Now for the first time curators will have plenty of room to experiment, juxtaposing the old with the new, an ongoing inter-generational discourse, that in this first exhibit shows just how relevant the old guard of the collection is.

Marsden Hartley looks as bold and beautiful as ever, and Edward Hopper has the room and light-filled space he thrives in. Jackson Pollock’s Number 27 is in the company of Willem de Kooning’s Woman and Bicycle, and across the way the irascible spray paint-wielding Hedda Sterne holds her own quite well and is looking very contemporary, thank you. It's clear as history unfolds floor by floor that the myths, versus the realities, of America are not easy stories. Lynchings, war, depression, strikes, protests, and social changes are on display in rawness and beauty.

Can the Whitney re-establish itself and keep the discussion going? I think yes. But it has to be about inclusion. Art is being made all over the country, by an incredibly diverse range of artists. Can we quibble about the building's exterior design? Sure. Although I like it, as a whole the industrial structure sits well in the district, a once gritty and rough neighborhood. The question I asked was will it survive the Hudson River, should it decide to spew forth into Chelsea again? And it will, and yes, they have thought about it.

So when you visit after the new Whitney opens on May 1st, take the elevator to the 8th floor, be swooned by the two Hartley paintings as the doors open, revel in a fabulous collection that now has room to show off. Be sure to take the exterior steps as you go floor to floor, contemplate the David Smith sculpture sitting proudly on the elevated steel and concrete runways, or take a seat in one of Mary Heilmann's colorful chairs. Look around: the mighty river, the city, it's an American story continuing to unfold, inside and out.

Other Articles: Peter Schjeldahl, New York Odyssey (The New Yorker, April 27) // Don't Be Aloof (The Economist, April 25) Holland Carter, New Whitney Museum’s First Show, ‘America Is Hard to See’ (New York Times, April 23) Philip Kennicott, At the Whitney, a new structure forges a different relationship with the city (Washington Post, April 19)

2012 Whitney Biennial... meh

After a winter of spring and a political primary that feels like a replay of the Scopes trial, I was looking forward to this year's episode of the Whitney Biennial. When it comes around every other year, I dive into it whole-hearted, open-minded, and try real hard to like it.

I really do look forward to this show, and of course there are many things each round to like. The year long run-up, choosing the curators, rumors of whose studio got a visit, and finally the announcement of the chosen -- it's fun. I don't think it will make or break a career as it once may have, but it certainly can't hurt. However, if this year's assemblage is what the curators feel is the pulse of the art world right now, we may have to call a code, because this patient is weak.

Works by the 2012 Biennial's fifty-one artists, selected by Elisabeth Sussman, Sondra Gilman (Curator of Photography at the Whitney), and Jay Sanders, take over most of the Whitney's floor space. The fourth floor has become a 6,000-square-foot, all-white performance space for music, dance, theater, and other events. That wedge of a window jutting out onto Madison Ave. has also been exposed -- new to me. It's very dramatic: I'd like to see it stay uncovered. Oddly, we weren't allowed to take pictures there.

So what did I like? The most striking piece for me is Werner Herzog's Hearsay of the Soul, an installation of projected etchings by Hercules Segers with music by Ernst Reijseger (Requiem for a Dying Planet and Cave of Forgotten Dreams). An excerpt from Herzog's film Ode to the Dawn of Man features the cellist Ernst Reijseger and Harmen Fraanje on the organ -- it's a stunning, emotional piece.

I could stop here, as nothing else in this biennial can compare with the quality and depth of Herzog's presentation. It's Hollywood-grade and he's not even an American artist. I make this judgment, of course, without seeing the performances that will take place in the fourth floor in the months to come, and as regular readers know, I don't have the patience to sit and watch too many video installations. That said, this biennial is weighted heavily toward film and video, with ongoing performances and screenings over the run of the show. Wu Tsang's environment Green Room -- part bar, part underground hang-out -- actually brought back memories of my shadowy past, it's true. Baltimore filmmaker Matt Porterfield's Putty Hill screens on May 9 to 13.

I did like Tom Thayer's mixed-media assemblages -- he shows with the Derek Eller Gallery -- and the outsider-ish artist, the late Forrest Bess. You may know Bess's paintings and constructions, but he also performed surgeries on his man-parts and documented the process with photographs -- I know. He always wanted to exhibit the documentation next to his paintings, and his gallerist, the great Betty Parsons, always politely declined. Well, this is your chance, along with a letter to President Eisenhower and other archival curiosities. I do enjoy his paintings.

Add Nicole Eisenman's paintings to my also-likes. The Breakup (by Blackberry) is a hoot, and also an arrangement of forty-five monotypes, nice work. Andrew Masullo's colorful canvases reminded me of Tom Nozkowski paintings. Kai Althoff makes a dramatic statement as you enter the fourth-floor galleries, with paintings hanging from a woven silk drape.

See, I did find goodness. It's impossible to have such a large gathering of artists and not find something to like, hopefully love and be inspired by. I'm fortunate enough to see many art exhibits, many great ones -- all over the country -- lots of inspired, knee-weakening, heart-throbbing art being produced. If you don't find it at this edition of the biennial, there's always Baltimore, D.C., Philly, Boston, St. Louis -- pssst, the Museum of Modern Art has a pretty nice Cindy Sherman retro, Diego Rivera, and a very inspiring print exhibit.

The 2012 Whitney Biennial runs through May 27th. More pictures here.

An O'Keeffe I Hardly Knew

A flower is never just a flower. I suppose that's true once it's manipulated through a camera or, in Georgia O'Keeffe's case, paint. No matter how profusely she denied it, the sexual connection in O'Keeffe's work dogged and frustrated her from her very first exhibit in 1917 at Alfred Stieglitz's gallery, 291. To me her work often has a sensuousness about it, throughout her long career.

But clearly from around 1916 through the 30s, as the new exhibit Georgia O'Keeffe: Abstraction at the Whitney Museum proves, the young O'Keeffe is at her most provocative and challenging best. Long before she became known as the high priestess of a Southwestern kitsch, she was among the first American artists to embrace a pure abstraction that in her words, "is often the most definite form for the intangible thing in myself that I can only clarify in paint."

O'Keeffe forged a rare independence in a very conservative turn-of-the-century America, where abstraction and feminism (she was way ahead) could brand you a communist or at least un-American -- sound familiar? In a now legendary art world relationship with Stieglitz, he would take control of promoting O'Keeffe's image and exhibiting her work and she would be his muse. A darkened gallery of his nude photographs of her is part of the exhibit -- she was quite an attractive woman, hairy armpits and all.

To avoid what critics of her 1917 show called "portraits of female sexual experience," she shifted focus for her next exhibit in 1924, saying, "my work this year is very much on the ground. I suppose the reason I got down to an effort to be objective is that I didn't like the interpretation of my other things."


Abstraction, however, would remain the foundation of her life's work, but all the large scale sun-bleached skulls and adobe architecture to follow can't compare with the stunning -- yes, sensuous -- ground-breaking early charcoals, watercolors, and paintings of her early years. I was blown away by the power of her simple charcoal drawings, the washy, bleeding watercolors, and her brilliant thinly layered paint. She was laying down paint in colors and hues never before seen, which would influence many of the men who followed her lead like Dove, Rothko, Avery, Marsden Hartley, and many more -- she was an American original.

This exhibit moves to the Phillips Collection on February 6, 2010.