Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt (1875–1942). American sculptor, patron, and collector, the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art. She was born in New York, the daughter of Cornelius II Vanderbilt, an immensely wealthy railroad magnate. In 1896 she married Harry Payne Whitney, a financier and world-class polo player. After her marriage she turned seriously to art, her training as a sculptor including periods at the Art Students League, New York, and in Paris, where she knew
Rodin. She won several major commissions, notably for monuments commemorating the First World War, including the Washington Heights War Memorial, New York (1921), and the St-Nazaire Monument, Providence, Rhode Island (1924), marking the landing of American troops in France. Her style was traditional, but she was sympathetic towards progressive art and is much more important as a patron than as an artist. In 1907 she opened her New York studio as an exhibition space for young artists who found the commercial galleries closed to them, and in 1908 she bought four of the seven paintings that were sold at The
Eight's exhibition. In 1914 she put her patronage on a more formal basis when she bought the house adjoining her studio, converted it into galleries, and opened it as the Whitney Studio; later she founded a series of organizations in New York with the same aim of helping young artists—the Friends of Young Artists (1915), the Whitney Studio Club (1918), and the Whitney Studio Galleries (1928). In 1929 she offered to donate her own collection of about 500 American paintings, sculptures, and drawings to the Metropolitan Museum, New York, but the gift was turned down. Consequently in 1930 she announced the founding of the Whitney Museum of American Art and it opened the following year at 10 West 8th Street in a group of converted brownstone buildings. Originally the museum aimed to cover the whole span of American art, but in 1949 the Trustees decided that it could not compete with established collections in the historical field and sold all works done before 1900. In 1966 this decision was modified; the museum began again to collect earlier works, but it concentrates on the 20th century. There have been two changes of location to provide more space for the rapidly expanding collection. In 1954 the museum moved to a new building at 22 West 54th Street on land provided by the
Museum of Modern Art, and in 1966 to its present home—a spectacular building designed for it by Marcel Breuer at 945 Madison Avenue. The museum now has the largest and finest collection of 20th-century American art in the world, including, for example, some 2,000 works by Edward
Hopper donated by his widow. Every other year it holds the Whitney Biennial, a major showcase for work by living artists (this began in 1973; previously the exhibition had been annual).
Also named after Mrs Whitney is the Whitney Gallery of Western Art at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center at Cody, Wyoming. She was instrumental in acquiring the land for the Center and did a large equestrian statue of Buffalo Bill for it (1924). She donated funds to many other good causes, artistic and otherwise (in the First World War she equipped and maintained a hospital in France), but she was ‘a woman of modest disposition who carried out her public activities quietly’ (
Dictionary of American Biography). In 1932 she published a novel,
Walking the Dusk, under the pseudonym E. J. Webb.
Her nephew
John Hay Whitney (1904–1982) was a publisher, diplomat (he was Ambassador to Great Britain, 1956–60), and collector of paintings, including 20th-century works. From 1946 to 1956 he was chairman of the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
