The Whitney Museum of American Art
United States, New York, New York
5.73
Cultural.
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As the preeminent institution devoted to the art of the United States, the Whitney Museum of American Art presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Whitney is dedicated to collecting, preserving, interpreting, and exhibiting American art, and its collection-arguably the finest holding of twentieth-century American art in the world-is the Museum's key resource. The Museum's signature exhibition, the Biennial, is the country's leading survey of the most recent developments in American art.
Innovation has been a hallmark of the Whitney since its beginnings. It was the first museum dedicated to the work of living American artists and the first New York museum to present a major exhibition of a video artist Nam June Paik in 1982. Such figures as Jasper Johns, Cy Twombly, and Cindy Sherman were given their first museum retrospectives by the Whitney. The Museum has consistently purchased works within the year they were created, often well before the artists became broadly recognized. The Whitney was the first museum to take its exhibitions and programming beyond its walls by establishing corporate-funded branch facilities, and the first museum to undertake a program of collection-sharing with the San Jose Museum of Art in order to increase access to its renowned collection.
The Whitney Museum of American Art owes its striking granite presence at the southeast corner of Madison Avenue and 75th Street to the Hungarian-born, Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer -1902-1981-. To design a third home for the Museum which had gradually migrated northward from its original location on West Eighth Street to West 54th Street Breuer worked with Hamilton Smith, creating a strong modernist statement in a neighborhood of traditional limestone, brownstone, and brick row houses and postwar apartment buildings. Considered somber, heavy, and even brutal at the time of its completion in 1966 -an inverted Babylonian ziggurat, according to one critic,- Breuer's building is now recognized as daring, strong, and innovative. It has come to be regarded as one of New York City's most notable buildings and identified with the Whitney's approach to art.
www.whitney.org
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