WHITNEY, GERTRUDE VANDERBILT

born Jan. 9, 1875, New York, N.Y., U.S. died April 18, 1942, New York City ne Gertrude Vanderbilt American sculptor and art patron, founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. Gertrude Vanderbilt was a great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of one of America's great fortunes. From her early years she was interested in painting, and after her marriage in 1896 to Harry Payne Whitney, she began the serious study of sculpture, with teachers in New York City and Paris. In 1907 she opened a studio in Greenwich Village and the following year won her first prize, for a sculpture of Pan. Among her later notable creations were the Aztec Fountain (1912) for the Pan American Building and the Titanic Memorial (191431), both in Washington, D.C.; the Victory Arch (191820), the Washington Heights War Memorial (1921), and the Peter Stuyvesant Monument (193639), all in New York City; the Saint-Nazaire Monument (1924) in Saint-Nazaire, France; and the Columbus Memorial (192833), in Palos, Spain. All her works are simple, direct, and largely traditional in character. At her Greenwich Village studio she came in contact with such progressive young artists as Robert Henri, William Glackens, John Sloan, George Luks, and Arthur B. Davies. She bought many of their works and, to relieve their difficulty in finding exhibition space, 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. While her encouragement and tangible assistance helped a great many young artistsincluding, in addition to those mentioned, Joseph Stella, Charles Sheeler, Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper, John Steuart Curry, and Stuart DavisWhitney's own collection of contemporary American art grew apace. In 1929, believing that American modernists deserved greater recognition, she offered to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art her entire collection of about 500 works of American artists. The traditionalist director of the Metropolitan refused the offer, whereupon Whitney set about the next year founding her own institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art, which was founded in 1930 and opened in November 1931 in Greenwich Village (it moved in 1954 to West 54th Street and, then, in 1966 to West 75th Street and Madison Avenue). She also helped fund the Whitney Wing of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Additional reading Flora Miller Biddle, The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made: A Family Memoir (1999); Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney Conner, Those Early Years (1999).