The story
Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was a sculptor as well as a Vanderbilt, and by the 1920s she had gathered hundreds of works by living American artists that the art establishment would not take seriously. When she offered the collection to the Metropolitan Museum, it turned her down. So in 1930 she founded her own museum, devoted entirely to American art, and it has stayed that way ever since.
The Whitney holds the largest body of Edward Hopper's work anywhere, most of it left to the museum in 1968 by his widow Josephine, a painter herself. Its most famous Hopper came much earlier. Early Sunday Morning, with its shuttered shopfronts and low raking light, was bought for the founding collection with Gertrude Whitney's own money. The museum also owns Alexander Calder's Circus, a whole miniature big top of wire acrobats and animals he made in Paris in the 1920s.
Since 2015 the museum has occupied a stack of glass terraces by the architect Renzo Piano, wedged between the Hudson River and the elevated High Line park in the Meatpacking District. Every couple of years its Biennial takes the temperature of new American art, and usually starts an argument about it.
