(1875–1942). U.S. sculptor and art patron Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was best known as the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City, New York. The museum, meant to exhibit the works of progressive young artists, was founded in 1930 and opened in November 1931 in Greenwich Village. Whitney also helped fund the Whitney Wing of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.
Gertrude Vanderbilt was born on January 9, 1875, in New York City, a great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of one of America’s great fortunes. Her interest in painting developed at an early age, and, after her marriage in 1896 to Harry Payne Whitney, she studied sculpture with teachers in New York City and Paris, France.
In 1907 Whitney opened a studio in Greenwich Village and the following year won her first prize, for the sculpture Pan. Among her later notable creations were the Aztec Fountain (1912) for the Pan American Building and the Titanic Memorial (1914–31), both in Washington, D.C.; the Victory Arch (1918–20), the Washington Heights War Memorial (1921), and the Peter Stuyvesant Monument (1936–39), all in New York City; the Saint-Nazaire Monument (1924), in Saint-Nazaire, France; and the Columbus Memorial (1928–33), in Palos, Spain. All her works are simple, direct, and largely traditional in character. She also worked on a more modest scale, creating many sculptures in reaction to World War I, which deeply affected her. In 1923 she had a major exhibition of works on this subject at the Art Institute of Chicago.
At Whitney’s Greenwich Village studio she came in contact with such progressive young artists as Robert Henri, William J. Glackens, John French Sloan, George Luks, and Arthur B. Davies. She bought many of their works. To relieve their difficulty in finding exhibition space, she opened the Whitney Studio in a building adjoining her work studio in 1914 and prevailed upon her sister-in-law’s secretary, Juliana R. Force, to help manage it.
From that beginning evolved the Whitney Studio Club in 1918 and the Whitney Studio Galleries in 1928. Her encouragement and tangible assistance helped a great many young artists, including—in addition to those already mentioned—Joseph Stella, Charles Sheeler, Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper, John Steuart Curry, and Stuart Davis.
Whitney’s own collection of contemporary American art grew as she became involved in the New York art world. In 1929, believing that American modernists deserved greater recognition, she offered to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City her entire collection of about 500 works of American artists. The traditionalist director of the Metropolitan refused the offer, so Whitney set about the next year founding her own institution. She died on April 18, 1942, in New York City.