(Excerpt from Memorial Exhibition, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whi...)
Excerpt from Memorial Exhibition, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney: January 26 to February 28, 1943 In these preparatory years she had never faltered in her determination to become a professional sculptor, but doubt cast upon her seriousness of pur pose, she was later to acknowledge, was a considerable psychological handicap at this stage of her progress. In her new environment she found in her fellow artists, who themselves had obstacles of another sort to overcome, a ready sympathy, and her natural talent and capacity for hard work won their imme diate respect. How she repaid this friendliness and understanding belongs to another chapter in the story of her life. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
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Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was born January 9, 1875 in New York City, the second of three daughters and fourth of seven children of the younger Cornelius Vanderbilt, financier and philanthropist, and Alice Claypoole (Gwynne) Vanderbilt. Her father presided over the railroad empire founded by his grandfather, "Commodore" Cornelius Vanderbilt.
Gertrude Vanderbilt was educated by private tutors and at the Brearley School in New York. About 1900 she began study in New York with Hendrik Christian Andersen and then with James Earle Fraser, and at the Art Students' League. For several years before 1914 she was a pupil of Andrew O'Connor in Paris; she also received guidance from Auguste Rodin, whose influence may be noted in the firmness of her handling of materials and in her interest in the formal structure of figures. She received honorary degrees from New York University (1922), Tufts (1924), Rutgers (1934), and Russell Sage College (1940).
Mrs. Whitney had early been attracted to the fine arts, and after her marriage she became seriously committed to a career in sculpture. Mrs. Whitney proved capable of developing her own style. As early as 1901 she exhibited her first work, "Aspiration, " at the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo. Six years later she opened a studio in Greenwich Village, and in 1908 she won her first award, for her figure "Pan, " in a competition held by the New York Architectural League. During these years in Greenwich Village, Mrs. Whitney came to understand the problems of the young artists engaged in a movement to liberate American art from academic restrictions and open the way for new viewpoints.
When in 1908 "The Eight, " led by Robert Henri and including John Sloan, William Glackens, Arthur B. Davies, and George Luks, held their own exhibition at the Macbeth Gallery in protest against the refusal of the National Academy of Design to show their realistic paintings, Mrs. Whitney purchased four of the seven paintings sold. Soon she was providing exhibit space in her studio to the dissidents and contributing to their organizations.
In 1914 she bought the house adjoining her studio, converted it into galleries, and, with the help of Mrs. Juliana Force, opened the Whitney Studio to artists who might otherwise have found the doors of private galleries and established societies closed to them. Through further organizations - the Friends of Young Artists (1915), the Whitney Studio Club (1918), and finally the Whitney Studio Galleries (1928) - she helped exhibit and sell the work of dozens of American artists, including Sloan, Glackens, Ernest Lawson, Charles Sheeler, Edward Hopper, Stuart Davis, Joseph Stella, Reginald Marsh, and John Steuart Curry.
In 1929, believing that museums and galleries had become more hospitable to the modernists, Mrs. Whitney decided to close her gallery and donate her entire collection of almost five hundred contemporary American works to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When her offer was flatly refused by the conservative director of the Metropolitan, she organized her own institution, with Mrs. Force as its director. The Whitney Museum of American Art opened in November 1931. It grew rapidly in prestige and influence, moving in 1954 from its original quarters on 8th Street in Greenwich Village to a larger building on West 54th Street. To a great extent, its success derived from its receptivity to the new and experimental and from its policy of purchasing only the works of living American artists. Throughout these years, Mrs. Whitney continued her own work.
After the outbreak of World War I, Mrs. Whitney equipped and maintained the American Field Hospital in the war zone at Juilly, France. The war also had an impact upon her sculpture, affecting not so much her technique, which was always realistic, as her subject matter. Her earlier works had been decorative in intent and function and tended to the formally heroic or sentimental. Her war sculpture was far more simple and direct, as in the panels for the "Victory Arch" (1918 - 20) and the "Washington Heights War Memorial" (1921), both in New York City, and the "St. Nazaire Monument" (1924) in France. Mrs. Whitney's unsentimental figures express the meaning of the conflict and the heroism of the solitary soldier. The same simplicity distinguishes her later commissions, such as the "Spirit of the Daughters of the American Revolution" (1917) on the grounds of Constitution Hall in Washington; the equestrian statue of William F. ("Buffalo Bill") Cody (1922) in Cody, Wyo. ; the "Columbus Memorial" (1928 - 33) at Palos, Spain; and the "Peter Stuyvesant Monument" (1936 - 39) at Stuyvesant Square in New York. Her last work, "The Spirit of Flight" (1939 - 40), designed for the New York World's Fair, contains a lyrical note not otherwise present in her work. Mrs. Whitney's "Caryatid" (1913) and "Spanish Peasant" (1912) are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art; "Wherefore, " a seated figure bowed as though overwhelmed by the burden of life, was purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago in 1910.
She died in New York City of heart disease and was buried, after Episcopal services, at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. The Whitney Museum, supported by her bequest, moved in 1966 to a new building on Madison Avenue at 75th Street.
Mrs. Whitney's greatest contribution to art, however, was as a patron. For almost thirty-five years she utilized the immense Vanderbilt and Whitney wealth to promote American art and aid artists less fortunate than herself. The Society of Independent Artists, formed in 1917, was supported for fifteen years by her contributions, as was The Arts, the leading liberal art magazine of the 1920's, edited by Forbes Watson. The Whitney Museum of American Art represented the culmination of her many efforts to encourage art in the United States. She was a prominent social figure and hostess. Her great wealth afforded her the opportunity to become a patron of the arts, but she also devoted herself to the advancement of women in art, supporting and exhibiting in women-only shows and ensuring that women were included in mixed shows. She was also a patron of the opera and donated funds for the Whitney Wing of the American Museum of Natural History in New York. Most significant among her commissions were the "Aztec Fountain" (1912) for the Pan American Building, Washington, D. C. ; the "Titanic Memorial" (1914 - 31) at Potomac Park in Washington; and the "El Dorado Fountain, " which won her the bronze medal for sculpture at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition at San Francisco.
(Excerpt from Memorial Exhibition, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whi...)
She was elected an Associate of the National Academy of Design in 1940.
Gertrude Whitney was a woman of modest disposition who carried on her public activities quietly.
On August 25, 1896, she married Harry Payne Whitney, financier and sportsman. The couple had three children: Cornelius Vanderbilt, Flora Payne, and Barbara.
