The Whitney first opened its doors in 1931 to showcase American art. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was the museum’s founder assembled a rich and diverse collection that she offered with an endowment to The Metropolitan Museum of Art. When the offer was refused, she opened her own Museum and that is how The Whitney Museum began. Today the Museum presents the full range of twentieth-century and contemporary American art, with a special focus on works by living artists. The Museum purchases works within the year they are created, often well before the artists became recognized.
While traveling on the train to New York, I couldn’t wait to see The Whitney. From a previous blog about The New Britain Museum of Art I spoke about the Benton Murals. I wanted to see what type of Museum would sell the wonderful murals because they were uncomfortable with the subject matter and kept them locked so that you could only view them by special permission.
The Singular Visions exhibit was one I wanted to see as it represented different types of art. The Whitney curator’s organized this to show “Through their variety of mediums, sizes, styles, and subjects, the works in Singular Visions encourage a range of powerful experiences and reveal how contemporary artists have stretched the very boundaries of what an artwork can be.”
Two pieces stand out in my mind from this collection. When you first get off the elevator you are greeted by George Segal’s sculpture of plaster pedestrians paused at a blinking traffic sign. Okay, I thought this was interesting. I quickly moved through the room with Simmons’s empty boxing ring festooned with tap shoes and wondered if I should stay and try to contemplate the meaning of it all only to turn a corner in a small nook area to my surprise there on the wall was Georgia O’Keefe’s “Ladder to the Moon”. I quickly searched my pocketbook for a pen and on the back of my museum calendar I sketched the painting. I noticed the words “way too advant guarde” that I had scrawled down as notes for my visit. I shook my head and my friend Sheryl asked what was up. I gazed at the ladder reaching up to the moon in the turquoise sky and thought how personal and spiritual this painting is and how odd to find it between a plaster sculpture and a boxing ring.
Respite was found in the Salon Gallery where paintings of the Breaking Ground: The Whitney’s Founding Collection was showcased. In the center of the room two red velvet chairs faced each other. How inviting they looked to me. As I sat down in the soft velvet a sense of peace and relaxation overwhelmed me. I lifted my head to gaze at a splendor of about 80 canvases on three Walls that were part of the formation of the Whitney Museum. I was thrilled to see two works by Benton in this collection. The Lord is my Shepard and Poker Night. I think that The Whitney most definitely wished they never sold the Benton Murals to The New Britain Museum of Art. I was also happy to see Edward Hopper’s, “Early Sunday Morning” painting as I was disappointed that I didn’t get to see the whole exhibit.
On the way downstairs we quickly explored the Dianna Molzan exhibit where I did stop to pay some attention to her very colorful Untitled, 2009 oil on canvas that had part of the canvas cut off. As I was taking my own color painting class at the time I could understand and said to my friend, “Do you know how many times in my class that I wanted to do just that!”
I was disappointed to find that I could not take any pictures. The only pictures you could take were of what was in the lobby. So the only one I could take was George Tooker’s, The Subway. So I took this picture to share but all the others are from the Museum’s website. I must say I was shocked. Could this be the museum that turned away the Benton Murals? The current exhibits whether you liked them or not, made you comfortable or uncomfortable, seemed to create a dichotomy of emotion from tension to the spiritual. It seemed to go from one extreme to another which may or may not have been the intent all along. My friend and I discussed this very topic as we drank lemonade accented with basil that was offered for sale at the café while sitting on a bench looking out to the courtyard where there was supposed to be a sculpture garden. We looked at the concrete walls and floor of the courtyard and wondered where all the sculpture went. Perhaps it has found sanctuary somewhere else until The Whitney’s new building in downtown Manhattan is finished.
By Kim Zarra
Pictures Link: http://www1.snapfish.com/snapfish/thumbnailshare/AlbumID=4180461015/a=141417625_141417625/otsc=SHR/otsi=SALBlink/COBRAND_NAME=snapfish/
References: http://whitney.org/
No comments:
Post a Comment