June 5, 2015

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Published by The Bee Publishing Company, Newtown, Connecticut

INDEXES ON
PAGES 36 & 37

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney by Robert Henri

(18651929), oil on canvas, approximately 50 by
72 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York, gift of Flora Whitney Miller.
Running People at 2,616,216 by Jonathan
Borofsky, 19781979, latex paint on wall and/or
ceiling. Purchase, with funds from the Painting
and Sculpture Committee.

Evolving And Becoming

The New Whitney Museum Of American Ar t
BY JAMES D. BALESTRIERI
NEW YORK CITY This is going to sound
like an insult, but it is not. Quite the opposite, in fact. The new Whitney Museum of
American Art looks like an enormous extinct
invertebrate, a complex arthropod that took a
detour down one of evolutions myriad deadend roads in order to fill a gap between disparate ecosystems. Situated at the southern
foot of the High Line in the rapidly gentrifying Meatpacking District and just a stones
throw from the high-end Chelsea galleries, it
aims to house classic American works of art
while seeking out and making a space for the
not-yet-imagined. Could or should the
Whitney be anything else?
A building designed from the inside out, as
its architect Renzo Piano says, is, in its
essence, anti-skyscraper, anti-mammal, antibird. It is a throwback to life at its earliest
and most aquatic, and Pianos creation, especially in the cutaway rendering, resembles
one of those old arthropods, a giant beached
trilobite gliding back toward the Hudson,
looking to be reborn.
But the resemblance is more than physical;
it is structural as well. The eight floors of the
Whitney are exoskeletal, that is, the weight is
borne by the exterior shell and the large and
beautiful terraces that cantilever magnificently from the upper floors. Pianos design
makes it possible for the exhibition spaces
inside to be open, to be free of pillars, I-beams
and interior walls.
There are no rooms in the new Whitney.
There is only room, and lots of it. This will
allow for an impressive and radical flexibility
on each floor, and will accommodate all manner of exhibitions and works. Large windows
at the west end of some of the floors connect
( continued on page 10C )

Whitney Museum of American Art, the view from Gansevoort Street. Karin Jobst photo

10C Antiques and The Arts Weekly June 5, 2015

Jeweled City by Gerald K. Geerlings (18971998), 1931, etching and aquatint, sheet: 209/16 by 155/8 inches; plate: 159/16 by 1111/16 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase, with funds from
the Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund. Estate of Gerald Kenneth Geerlings

Fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. Nic Lehoux photo

Chinese Restaurant by Max Weber (18811961),

1915, oil, charcoal and collaged paper on linen, 40
by 481/8 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art,
New York, purchase. Estate of Max Weber

Pittsburgh by Elsie Driggs (18951992), 1927,

oil on canvas, 34 by 40 inches. Whitney
Museum of American Art, New York; gift of
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

Noise Number 13, by e.e. cummings,

1925, oil on canvas, 595/8 by 42 inches.
Purchase, with funds from the Painting
and Sculpture Committee.

The Subway by George Tooker (19202011), 1950, tempera on composition board, 18 by 36 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New
York, purchase, with funds from the Juliana Force Purchase Award.
Estate of George Tooker and DC Moore Gallery, New York City

Calders Circus by Alexander Calder, 19261931, wire, wood, metal, cloth,

yarn, paper, cardboard, leather, string, rubber tubing, corks, buttons, rhinestones, pipe cleaners and bottle caps, 54 by 94 by 94 inches. Purchase,
with funds from a public fundraising campaign in May 1982. One-half the
funds were contributed by the Robert Wood Johnson Jr Charitable Trust.

The view from the eighth floor terrace is echoed in selections from the
museums collection of Modernist paintings, prints and photographs.

June 5, 2015 Antiques and The Arts Weekly 11C

Whitney Museum of American Art as viewed from the Hudson River.

Karin Jobst photo

Rose Castle by Joseph Cornell, 1945, assemblage, 11 by 1415/16 by

47/16 inches. Kay Sage Tanguy bequest.

Evolving And Becoming

The New Whitney Museum Of American Ar t
( continued from page 1C )
the museum to the city. Large windows to the east
connect the museum to the Hudson River and, as
Piano observed at the press preview, to the world
beyond. Outdoor spaces that are and will be filled
with art and a gallery of works on the first floor
open to the public, free of charge, confirm Pianos
intention that there should be no barrier
between the city and the building. For the first
time, the Whitney will have a place for educational outreach for all ages, the Laurie M. Tisch
Education Center, as well as a dedicated theater
for live performances.
Inside, the space has the feel of a downtown or
outer-borough industrial warehouse converted to
artists studios. The walls are factory gray and the
floors, made of wide, reclaimed pine boards, shush
under your feet as if they have been lightly sanded but not varnished. The smell of freshly sanded
wood is all that is lacking. With luck, some sculptor in residence will soon remedy that. Best of all,
when you stand in front of one of the works of art,
the building vanishes around it, just as the right
frame for a painting vanishes, enhancing the
experience without making its presence felt.
The glare of Felix Gonzales-Torress untitled
(America), composed of 12 strings of bare light
bulbs hanging in the stairway, bring visitors into
the first exhibition in the new museum, America
Is Hard To See. Blinding when you look into
them, illuminating when you look away, they echo
the unfinished nature of both the nation and its
art without sentiment or any longing for closure.
Beginning chronologically on the eighth floor
(like the Guggenheim without the slant),
America is Hard To See, which remains on view
until September 27, is organized around concepts
taken from the titles of specific works. Joseph
Cornells Rose Castle, for example, becomes the
name that gathers some of works on the seventh
floor, while Alexander Calders Circus gathers
others. These organizing principles, outlining historic, aesthetic and ideological preoccupations in
American art since 1900, are deliberately
provocative, inviting disagreement and discussion.
Chief curator Donna De Salvo has taken a deep
dive into the museums extensive holdings to
assemble this exhibition, coming up with some
obscure and beautiful pearls. Modernist poet e.e.
cummingss large canvas, Noise Number 13,
1925, flickers with Stanton Macdonald-Wrights
synchromism and Italian Futurism. Sounds as
vortices pour into and out of eye-ears, while the
blare of records note the sheen on the spinning
78 at far right just above the middle of the canvas
folds and spindles the picture plane, space and
time. cummingss drawings dot his tremendous
antiwar novel, The Enormous Room, but who
knew he painted like this?
Small moments get space to breathe in the galleries. A 1931 etching and aquatint by Gerald K.
Geerlings, Jeweled City, captures the soft light

of a quiet moment in a big city. The rhythm of the

elevated train plays counterpoint to the whispers
of the two men at lower right and the city, framed
by the riveted girders, has a sacred incandescence. You can hear Aaron Copland and Charles
Ives scratching down notes to capture the sounds
and silences. By contrast, the simplicity of forms
in Elsie Driggss 1927 painting Pittsburgh
makes a steel mill look like a diabolical laboratory. The smokestacks and pipes seem almost airbrushed, appropriating commercial art in ways
you will encounter again on the lower floors,
among more recent works.
Classic works benefit from elbow room in the
new museum, and from rubbing elbows with
unlikely neighbors. Mirrors in the windows of
Cornells Rose Castle reflect the viewer vaguely.
While a Renaissance battle begins in the forecourt, the rose-colored palace (like the famous
glasses), beautiful as it is, it is not anywhere we
want to be, nor, for that matter, is the thicket
behind it. After a few minutes in front of the work,
the mirrors come to seem like the polished sur-

Installed in a stairwell, Felix Gonzalez-Torress

untitled (America), 1994, consists of 12 light
strings, each with 42 15-watt light bulbs and
rubber
sockets,
dimensions
variable.
Purchase, with funds from the Contemporary
Painting and Sculpture Committee.

faces of prison bars. Nearby, George Tookers The

Subway, 1950, sees commuting as a labyrinth of
barred passages peopled by strangers who are
afraid, lonely, self-absorbed or all three. Like the
mirrored windows in Rose Castle, there is a
sameness and repetitiveness to the spaces in the
painting, a fearful symmetry that makes the city
seem like Blakes tyger, poised to pounce.
Visitors can choose between an adult audio tour
or one geared toward children. The adult commentary is excellent, providing historical and
structural context, but to hear artist Elizabeth
Murray call one of Willem de Koonings most
famous paintings, Woman and Bicycle, a catastrophe, and then to hear her describe it as exposure and sexuality that eventually come together in this extremely positive way, invites us to
look again at a work we might have come to take
for granted.
The audio commentary for children is also exceptionally fine. For Max Webers Chinese
Restaurant, the description begins by asking
where we are and what is recognizable a room
with a tiled floor and painted walls then goes
on to discuss the importance of red and gold in
Chinese culture and to state that Chinese restaurants were a relatively new phenomenon in 1915,
when Weber executed the work. Only then does
the commentary draw attention to the fragmented figure, a waiter, perhaps, zooming through the
room, and Cubisms interest in distorting perspective and capturing motion.
The first incarnation of the Whitney opened not
far from the new building. Robert Henris portrait
of the founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, is
the household goddess and presiding spirit of the
place, simultaneously inviting and daring you to
come in and grapple with the art from her perch
on the couch where she elongates, casually yet
elegantly, in Harlequin pajamas. The dichotomy
she represents is one that the new Whitney
embraces and should continue to embrace. It must
be hospitable to tradition and stand against tradition at the same time. This is why, when we
enter the Whitney, Piano wants us to enter the
world of art and freedom.
But straddling worlds is no easy feat of acrobatics Calders Circus, encompassing sculpture,
puppetry, performance, film shows us this. To
achieve it on an epochal scale, as those old
Cambrian arthropods did, is a miracle of biology.
We may think them strange, even bizarre, those
ancient life forms, but some of them adapted
again and again, occupying crucial niches in the
Pangean ecosystem and enduring for hundreds of
millions of years. May the new Whitney endure as
a nonmonument to an unconcluded journey of
becoming and becoming, again and again.
The Whitney Museum of American Art is at 99
Gansevoort Street. For information, 212-570-3600
or www.whitney.org.
Jim Balestrieri is the director of J.N. Bartfield
Galleries in New York City. A playwright and
author, he writes frequently writes about the arts.