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Newsstand Rate $1.75 INDEXES ONPAGES 36 & 37

June 5, 2015

Published by The Bee Publishing Company, Newtown, Connecticut

Whitney Museum of American Art, the view from Gansevoort Street. —Karin Jobst photo

BY JAMES D. BALESTRIERINEW YORK CITY — This is going to sound

like an insult, but it is not. Quite the oppo-site, in fact. The new Whitney Museum ofAmerican Art looks like an enormous extinctinvertebrate, a complex arthropod that took adetour down one of evolution’s myriad dead-end roads in order to fill a gap between dis-parate ecosystems. Situated at the southernfoot of the High Line in the rapidly gentrify-ing Meatpacking District and just a stone’sthrow from the high-end Chelsea galleries, itaims to house classic American works of artwhile seeking out and making a space for thenot-yet-imagined. Could — or should — theWhitney be anything else?

A building designed “from the inside out,” asits architect Renzo Piano says, is, in itsessence, anti-skyscraper, anti-mammal, anti-bird. It is a throwback to life at its earliestand most aquatic, and Piano’s creation, espe-cially in the cutaway rendering, resemblesone of those old arthropods, a giant beachedtrilobite gliding back toward the Hudson,looking to be reborn.

But the resemblance is more than physical;it is structural as well. The eight floors of theWhitney are exoskeletal, that is, the weight isborne by the exterior shell and the large andbeautiful terraces that cantilever magnifi-cently from the upper floors. Piano’s designmakes it possible for the exhibition spacesinside to be open, to be free of pillars, I-beamsand interior walls.

There are no rooms in the new Whitney.There is only room, and lots of it. This willallow for an impressive and radical flexibilityon each floor, and will accommodate all man-ner of exhibitions and works. Large windowsat the west end of some of the floors connect

Evolving And BecomingThe New Whitney Museum Of American Ar t

“Running People at 2,616,216” by JonathanBorofsky, 1978–1979, latex paint on wall and/orceiling. Purchase, with funds from the Paintingand Sculpture Committee.

“Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney” by Robert Henri(1865–1929), oil on canvas, approximately 50 by72 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art,New York, gift of Flora Whitney Miller.

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“Calder’s Circus” by Alexander Calder, 1926–1931, wire, wood, metal, cloth,yarn, paper, cardboard, leather, string, rubber tubing, corks, buttons, rhine-stones, pipe cleaners and bottle caps, 54 by 94¼ by 94¼ inches. Purchase,with funds from a public fundraising campaign in May 1982. One-half thefunds were contributed by the Robert Wood Johnson Jr Charitable Trust.

The view from the eighth floor terrace is echoed in selections from themuseum’s collection of Modernist paintings, prints and photographs.

“Noise Number 13,” by e.e. cummings,1925, oil on canvas, 595/8 by 42¾ inches.Purchase, with funds from the Paintingand Sculpture Committee.

“Jeweled City” by Gerald K. Geerlings (1897–1998), 1931, etching and aquatint, sheet: 209/16 by 155/8 inch-es; plate: 159/16 by 1111/16 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, purchase, with funds fromthe Lauder Foundation, Leonard and Evelyn Lauder Fund. ©Estate of Gerald Kenneth Geerlings

“Chinese Restaurant” by Max Weber (1881–1961),1915, oil, charcoal and collaged paper on linen, 40by 481/8 inches. Whitney Museum of American Art,New York, purchase. ©Estate of Max Weber

Fifth floor of the Whitney Museum of American Art. —Nic Lehoux photo

“The Subway” by George Tooker (1920–2011), 1950, tempera on composi-tion board, 18½ by 36½ inches. Whitney Museum of American Art, NewYork, purchase, with funds from the Juliana Force Purchase Award.©Estate of George Tooker and DC Moore Gallery, New York City

“Pittsburgh” by Elsie Driggs (1895–1992), 1927,oil on canvas, 34¼ by 40¼ inches. WhitneyMuseum of American Art, New York; gift ofGertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.

the museum to the city. Large windows to the eastconnect the museum to the Hudson River and, asPiano observed at the press preview, “to the worldbeyond.” Outdoor spaces that are and will be filledwith art and a gallery of works on the first flooropen to the public, free of charge, confirm Piano’sintention that there should be “no barrierbetween the city and the building.” For the firsttime, the Whitney will have a place for education-al outreach for all ages, the Laurie M. TischEducation Center, as well as a dedicated theaterfor live performances.

Inside, the space has the feel of a downtown orouter-borough industrial warehouse converted toartists’ studios. The walls are factory gray and thefloors, made of wide, reclaimed pine boards, shushunder your feet as if they have been lightly sand-ed but not varnished. The smell of freshly sandedwood is all that is lacking. With luck, some sculp-tor in residence will soon remedy that. Best of all,when you stand in front of one of the works of art,the building vanishes around it, just as the rightframe for a painting vanishes, enhancing theexperience without making its presence felt.

The glare of Felix Gonzales-Torres’s untitled(America), composed of 12 strings of bare lightbulbs hanging in the stairway, bring visitors intothe first exhibition in the new museum, “AmericaIs Hard To See.” Blinding when you look intothem, illuminating when you look away, they echothe unfinished nature of both the nation and itsart without sentiment or any longing for closure.

Beginning chronologically on the eighth floor(like the Guggenheim without the slant),“America is Hard To See,” which remains on viewuntil September 27, is organized around conceptstaken from the titles of specific works. JosephCornell’s “Rose Castle,” for example, becomes thename that gathers some of works on the seventhfloor, while Alexander Calder’s “Circus” gathersothers. These organizing principles, outlining his-toric, aesthetic and ideological preoccupations inAmerican art since 1900, are deliberatelyprovocative, inviting disagreement and discus-sion.

Chief curator Donna De Salvo has taken a deepdive into the museum’s extensive holdings toassemble this exhibition, coming up with someobscure and beautiful pearls. Modernist poet e.e.cummings’s large canvas, “Noise Number 13,”1925, flickers with Stanton Macdonald-Wright’ssynchromism and Italian Futurism. Sounds asvortices pour into and out of eye-ears, while theblare of records — note the sheen on the spinning78 at far right just above the middle of the canvas— folds and spindles the picture plane, space andtime. cummings’s drawings dot his tremendousantiwar novel, The Enormous Room, but whoknew he painted like this?

Small moments get space to breathe in the gal-leries. A 1931 etching and aquatint by Gerald K.Geerlings, “Jeweled City,” captures the soft light

of a quiet moment in a big city. The rhythm of theelevated train plays counterpoint to the whispersof the two men at lower right and the city, framedby the riveted girders, has a sacred incandes-cence. You can hear Aaron Copland and CharlesIves scratching down notes to capture the soundsand silences. By contrast, the simplicity of formsin Elsie Driggs’s 1927 painting “Pittsburgh”makes a steel mill look like a diabolical laborato-ry. The smokestacks and pipes seem almost air-brushed, appropriating commercial art in waysyou will encounter again on the lower floors,among more recent works.

Classic works benefit from elbow room in thenew museum, and from rubbing elbows withunlikely neighbors. Mirrors in the windows ofCornell’s “Rose Castle” reflect the viewer vaguely.While a Renaissance battle begins in the fore-court, the rose-colored palace (like the famousglasses), beautiful as it is, it is not anywhere wewant to be, nor, for that matter, is the thicketbehind it. After a few minutes in front of the work,the mirrors come to seem like the polished sur-

faces of prison bars. Nearby, George Tooker’s “TheSubway,” 1950, sees commuting as a labyrinth ofbarred passages peopled by strangers who areafraid, lonely, self-absorbed or all three. Like themirrored windows in “Rose Castle,” there is asameness and repetitiveness to the spaces in thepainting, a “fearful symmetry” that makes the cityseem like Blake’s tyger, poised to pounce.

Visitors can choose between an adult audio touror one geared toward children. The adult com-mentary is excellent, providing historical andstructural context, but to hear artist ElizabethMurray call one of Willem de Kooning’s mostfamous paintings, “Woman and Bicycle,” “a catas-trophe,” and then to hear her describe it as “expo-sure and sexuality” that eventually come “togeth-er in this extremely positive way,” invites us tolook again at a work we might have come to takefor granted.

The audio commentary for children is also excep-tionally fine. For Max Weber’s “ChineseRestaurant,” the description begins by askingwhere we are and what is recognizable — a roomwith a tiled floor and painted walls — then goeson to discuss the importance of red and gold inChinese culture and to state that Chinese restau-rants were a relatively new phenomenon in 1915,when Weber executed the work. Only then doesthe commentary draw attention to the fragment-ed figure, a waiter, perhaps, zooming through theroom, and Cubism’s interest in distorting perspec-tive and capturing motion.

The first incarnation of the Whitney opened notfar from the new building. Robert Henri’s portraitof the founder, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, isthe household goddess and presiding spirit of theplace, simultaneously inviting and daring you tocome in and grapple with the art from her perchon the couch where she elongates, casually yetelegantly, in Harlequin pajamas. The dichotomyshe represents is one that the new Whitneyembraces and should continue to embrace. It mustbe hospitable to tradition and stand against tra-dition at the same time. This is why, when weenter the Whitney, Piano wants us to “enter theworld of art and freedom.”

But straddling worlds is no easy feat of acrobat-ics — Calder’s “Circus,” encompassing sculpture,puppetry, performance, film — shows us this. Toachieve it on an epochal scale, as those oldCambrian arthropods did, is a miracle of biology.We may think them strange, even bizarre, thoseancient life forms, but some of them adaptedagain and again, occupying crucial niches in thePangean ecosystem and enduring for hundreds ofmillions of years. May the new Whitney endure asa nonmonument to an unconcluded journey ofbecoming and becoming, again and again.

The Whitney Museum of American Art is at 99Gansevoort Street. For information, 212-570-3600or www.whitney.org.

Jim Balestrieri is the director of J.N. BartfieldGalleries in New York City. A playwright andauthor, he writes frequently writes about the arts.

June 5, 2015 — Antiques and The Arts Weekly — 11C

Whitney Museum of American Art as viewed from the Hudson River.—Karin Jobst photo

“Rose Castle” by Joseph Cornell, 1945, assemblage, 11½ by 1415/16 by47/16 inches. Kay Sage Tanguy bequest.

Installed in a stairwell, Felix Gonzalez-Torres’suntitled (America), 1994, consists of 12 lightstrings, each with 42 15-watt light bulbs andrubber sockets, dimensions variable.Purchase, with funds from the ContemporaryPainting and Sculpture Committee.

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Evolving And BecomingThe New Whitney Museum Of American Ar t