As stately as a cruise ship — all gray and white, steel and glass — the new Whitney sails into the Meatpacking District, its windows and terraces overlooking the Hudson, the High Line and Chelsea, water towers and all.
Here we are, in Edward Hopper land. And there’s no better place for the Whitney — home to more Hopper works than any other museum in the world — than on gritty Gansevoort Street, where architect Renzo Piano’s $422 million, cantilevered dream of a building opens May 1.
Banners snapping in the Meatpacking breeze trumpet the new arrival: “Prince Lumber, meet Grant Wood.” And, while we’re at it, meet Wyeth, O’Keeffe, Calder, Chuck Close and hundreds of other American artists, including the museum’s namesake, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney herself.
A sculptor and savvy collector, Whitney once offered 700 pieces to the Met, which basically said “No thanks.” So in 1931, she started a museum of her own, on West Eighth Street.
As her collection grew, so did her museum. It moved to bigger digs on 54th Street (just behind MoMA), and then, in 1966, to the stone-faced Breuer building at Madison and 75th.
For the next 30 years, the Whitney struggled to expand until the Bloomberg administration came up with an offer it couldn’t refuse: a plot of land along the Hudson, overlooking an unlovely Department of Sanitation building to the east and Chelsea to the west.
Enter architect Piano and his shipshape design, with its four terraces, floor-to-ceiling windows and airy ceilings whose computerized shades adjust according to the light of the sky: opening wide on gray days, narrowing on bright ones. The floors are bright, with wide planks of reclaimed pine wood from old factories in Kentucky and New Jersey, one of which once manufactured Maidenform bras. How fitting that a neoprene underlay provides gentle support underfoot.
In a city about to lose its fire escapes, Piano’s given us a close second — exterior stairs running from the sixth to eighth floors. From there you can see southwest to the Statue of Liberty, northeast to the Empire State Building. You can even hover over the High Line while lolling in the neon-bright chairs of Mary Heilmann’s “Sunset” — art you can sit on! — in the shadow of the Standard hotel.
There’s also an education center, a theater, an eighth-floor cafe and a ground-floor restaurant. And there’s art nearly everywhere you look, even in the elevators and one stairwell, where Félix Gonzáles-Torres’ light-bulb strands dangle like vines of overripe fruit. (The only place where art has no foothold is the women’s bathrooms, with their acoustic ceilings and balky sensors in the big sinks. But the Whitney’s up-to-date in other respects: It now offers “gender-free” restrooms.)
The stone-floored lobby — which the Italian-born Piano prefers to call “a piazza” — leads to a small gallery that’s free without the $22 (up from $20) museum admission.
The first work you’ll see is Robert Henri’s portrait of Whitney herself, reclining on a divan in turquoise pajamas. The portrait horrified her hubby, Harry Payne Whitney, who didn’t want their socialite friends to see his wife wearing pants. When he wouldn’t hang it in their Fifth Avenue townhouse, she brought it to her studio.
Here, too, is Whitney’s own sculpture — a memorial to the Titanic, whose traumatized survivors disembarked on a pier not far from here — plus works from her peers, Hopper among them, who used to sketch live models in her studio for 20 cents a session.
That free gallery is the starting point of the museum’s opening show. Titled “America Is Hard To See” — the line’s taken from a Robert Frost poem — its focus couldn’t be clearer: This is art that helps define America.
Drawn from the museum’s permanent collection are more than 600 works, one-third of them by women. Grouped chronologically, it’s a mingling of the known and the newish: works you love and some you never guessed existed, like an oil by e.e. Cummings — yes, that e.e. Cummings, the poet — whose shell-like, pastel vortex suggests something by Georgia O’Keeffe.
The curators knew you’d guess that, because hanging on the next wall is an actual O’Keeffe.
If you spend your time on one floor alone, make it the seventh. It’s heaven for Hopper lovers, for here you’ll find “Early Sunday Morning,” a streetscape that might have been painted just blocks from where it hangs. Grouped nearby are Hopper’s “Seven A.M.,” with its dark welter of woods; a painting by Man Ray of a billiard table floating up past neon clouds; and Andrew Wyeth’s “Winter Fields,” with its dead crow, the flip side of “Christina’s World.”
Here and elsewhere, each gallery is named after a particular work. In “The Circus” — a room devoted to spectacles — Calder’s joyous acrobats and other big-top stars are displayed under glass, surrounded by George Bellows’ boxers, Hopper’s “Nighthawks” study and more.
Other galleries are devoted to darker, often disturbing things — war, bread lines, strikes, lynchings — by such artists as Alice Neel and Jacob Lawrence. At which point, you may need some air.
Step onto the seventh-floor terrace, where, if you stand a certain way, David Smith’s steel sculptures frame the work of art that is the Empire State Building.
Or hit the fifth floor, past Claes Oldenburg’s giant cigarette butts, George Segal’s pedestrians and Chuck Close’s Philip Glass, and settle down on one of five gray leather couches facing the river. Look south and you’ll see Lady Liberty; west, and there’s the quaint Lackawanna clock tower in Hoboken.
Art, you see, is everywhere.
The Whitney Museum of American Art, at 99 Gansevoort St., opens May 1. Admission: $22, $18 for seniors and students, free 18 and younger; pay-what-you-wish Fridays from 7 to 10 p.m. Closed Tuesdays. Info: whitney.org
A bite at the museum: The new eats are as appetizing as the art
In case Spice Market, Chelsea Market and the Standard Grill weren’t enough, the Meatpacking District’s getting two new places to dine — in the new Whitney Museum.
Danny Meyer, who ran the Untitled restaurant at the Whitney’s Madison Avenue building, will unveil both of the new eateries when the museum opens May 1.
The eighth-floor Studio Cafe, open to museumgoers and staffers only, will serve soups, salads and open-face sandwiches called “toasts” for about $10 a pop. Diners can enjoy them — and wine, cocktails and cappuccino — indoors or on the terrace looking south and west over the Hudson River.
The restaurant — again titled Untitled — will be a more independent venture. Just off the museum’s lobby, it will be open seven days a week to all. Like the cafe, it will be overseen by Gramercy Tavern chef Michael Anthony, who says the only thing the new restaurant and the old have in common is the name.
“We want to tell a seasonal story,” Anthony says, “so if you look at the plate, you’ll know what day of the year it is.” The menu won’t quite change daily, but often enough. Expect starters like mini lobster rolls and crab hushpuppies with pepper sauce; “raw bar” offerings of ceviche and sashimi; “vegetable-driven” dishes like charred leeks; and such entrees as grilled monkfish with green garlic and lobster sauce.
And for dessert? “Peach pie, strawberry poundcake with vanilla sabayon and triple chocolate chunk, gluten-free cookies,” Anthony promises. What could go wrong? His pastry chef is named Miro!
