Whitney Museum of Art

The Whitney Museum of American Art has often been referred to a citadel of American Art, partially due to the museums faÐ"§ade, a striking granite building (Figure 1), designed by Bauhaus trained architect Marcel Breuer. The museum perpetuates this reference through its biennial review of contemporary American Art, which the Whitney has become most famous for. The biennial has become since its inception a measure of the state of contemporary art in America today.

Since the Museum's opening in 1931, the collection has grown to more than 12,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and photographs, representing nearly 2,000 individual artists and providing the most complete overview of twentieth-century American art of any museum in the world. The collection is also recognized for its in-depth commitment to a number of key artists. From the first half of the century, such seminal figures as Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, Reginald Marsh, and Stuart Davis are richly represented. In the latter half of the century, the Museum has committed considerable resources toward acquiring a large body of works by Louise Nevelson, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Alex Katz, Ad Reinhardt, and others. The Museum's recent decision to dedicate two entire floors to the display of the Permanent Collection reaffirms the collection's central role in the Whitney Museum experience. This reflects the Whitney's desire to remain as an authority on Contemporary American Art by devoting the remaining floors to changing shows, such as the recent Cy Twombly exhibition (Figure 2) and Tim Hawkinson's first major in depth museum retrospective.

The Whitney Biennial held its first show in 1932, by the 1960's the biennial is quoted by Therese Schwartz in Nirvana Takes a Holiday as, "Ð'...the heaven on earth an artist could enter, after which would follow fame, possibly fortune, and a secure place among the angels." Of course here she is exaggerating to accentuate her point on the importance of the Whitney's biennial in the American art scene. A young artists not yet represented by a gallery or having had any published work may view the biennial as a haven where their work would now have an international audience and eventually security and commissions would follow to secure their place in the art world. In the 21st century the Whitney's Biennial still performs that function, but the exception being that there is much more involved. It presents a picture of a different art world in which young artists must look for recognition in the face of enormously increasing numbers of competitors and in the absence of pioneering art dealers and curators yearning to promote new vision and new ideas. For example, in the 2004 biennial their was 113 artists shown, consistent with the 2000 show of around 103 artists. The Whitney seems determined to include as much art as possible that can fit in their relatively small sized museum in order to better reflect the condition of the art scene in contemporary America.

To fully understand the role of the biennial today, we must look to its past. The earliest Biennials were assembled informally; easy groups of artists and museum personnel made the selections. Most of those in the show lived in New York City, although many had originally come from elsewhere. In 1937, the format was changed and the exhibitions became Annuals, with one year for painting, one for sculpture and various media. Some years, a single Whitney curator chose pieces; sometimes an outsider was added. In 1973, they went back to Biennials. Today the tradition remains the same as was begun fully in 1973. Increasingly in current shows curators search out a wide range of ethnic and gender varieties to fully grasp the breadth of American culture that is represented in current art work. Their has been much criticism of the Whitney and their exclusion of non-American artists. There are sections of critics who believe that the Whitney is only offering a narrow point of view by not including Mexican and Canadian artists. Also it has been pointed out by these critics that most of the art contained in previous shows is very location specific, especially to Los Angeles and New York. I believe it is necessary to counter this

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