Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

Fine Artist

• Born: January 9, 1875
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: April 18, 1942
• Place of death: New York, New York

American sculptor and art patron

Whitney was a distinguished American sculptor of figures, monuments, and reliefs for the public domain and an art patron and founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Areas of achievement Art, patronage of the arts, philanthropy

Early Life

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney was born an heiress to the family fortune established by her great-grandfather, Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt. Whitney was the second daughter and the fourth of seven children of Cornelius and Alice Claypoole Vanderbilt. Her father was a railroad magnate who indulged his interests as an art patron and collector. She was brought up in an atmosphere of wealth and luxury and spent most of her youth shuttling between her family’s two homes: a luxurious mansion in New York City and a summer estate in Newport, Rhode Island. She was educated by private tutors both at home and in Europe. Later, she attended New York’s exclusive, all-female Brearley School. During her youth, she wrote avidly in personal journals and showed promising skill in watercolor and drawing.

On August 25, 1896, Whitney was married to Harry Payne Whitney, an avid sportsman who spent his days traveling on hunting trips and playing polo. His father was William C. Whitney, a financier and secretary of the U.S. Navy under President Grover Cleveland. The couple maintained a town house on Fifth Avenue in New York City and a country estate at Westbury, Long Island. Whitney had three children a son, Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, and two daughters, Flora Payne and Barbara. Over the years, Whitney and her husband became estranged, yet they fostered a certain solidarity in times of crises and in relation to family obligations.

Whitney accepted the responsibility of rearing her three children and fulfilled her many social obligations. These obligations did not deter her from studying sculpture. She had three teachers from whom she learned her craft. The first was sculptor Hendrik Christian Andersen. Next, she studied with James Earle Fraser, who instructed her at the New Students League in New York City. Her last mentor, Andrew O’Connor, completed her education in Paris. Both Fraser and O’Connor were sculptors of public monuments and channeled her interests in the same direction. Her works soon became well known and highly regarded in the American and European art communities.

Life’s Work

During the first ten years of her work as a sculptor, Whitney exhibited under a pseudonym. She believed that her famous family name would never allow her the freedom of unbiased criticism from her viewers. It was not until 1910, when her statue, Paganism Immortal, won a distinguished rating at the National Academy that she began to exhibit under her own name. It was during these early years that Whitney set up her own studio in Greenwich Village. Though not taken seriously by the art community at first, she worked hard at perfecting her craft in her studio. Her dedication and perseverance soon won her the respect and companionship of other artists.

It was also during this time that Whitney became known as a patron of the arts. In 1908, when the “Eight of the Ashcan” group held an exhibit at the Macbeth Gallery, Whitney purchased four canvases from the exhibit. After witnessing the difficulties such young artists had in finding exhibition venues, she began to provide space in her studio where they could display their work. This temporary solution led her to establish the Whitney Studio in an adjacent building in 1914. It soon became a gathering place for various artists and developed into the Whitney Studio Club in 1918. Whitney stayed true to her original intentions for the gallery by continuing to exhibit and sell works by young artists who were either too poor or too unknown to afford dealers.

By this point, Whitney had built up her personal holdings in contemporary American art. In 1929, she chose to make her vast private art collection available to the public by offering her entire collection to New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, complete with an endowment to build a new museum wing in which to house her collection. After this offer was rejected, she established her own museum in 1931, known as the Whitney Museum of American Art. Whitney appointed Juliana Force, who had served as her assistant since 1914, as the museum’s first director. For the remainder of her life, Whitney continued to make private gifts to young artists in the hope of advancing their study and work.

The camaraderie Whitney experienced during her early years in Greenwich Village helped her to become more focused on her art and gave her great self-confidence in her abilities as a sculptor. Others, too, increasingly recognized her talent. In 1912, she was hired to construct the terra cotta fountain in the Aztec style for the patio of the Pan American Union Building in Washington, D.C. Also, her marble sculpture entitled Fountain of El Dorado, which depicted the frantic search for gold, won a bronze medal at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco. This fountain was later erected as a permanent fixture in Lima, Peru.

Whitney’s next large-scale work was the result of a 1914 competition in which she won the $50,000 Titanic Memorial commission. Her design and its execution are considered by many critics to be her most important work. This monument to U.S. citizens who lost their lives in the famous sea tragedy is eighteen feet high and was installed on the banks of the Potomac in Washington, D.C., in 1931. A seminude figure of a man, carved in granite, takes the shape of a cross atop the sculpture’s pedestal, thus contributing to the sculpture’s powerful symbolism of sacrifice and resurrection. Critics contend that the work of French sculptor Auguste Rodin profoundly influenced Whitney in her execution of this monument.

As it did for many of her generation, World War I had a profound influence on Whitney. The awful realities of the war and the resulting bloodshed prompted her to establish a field hospital at Juilly, France, in the fall of 1914. She personally administered to the wounded soldiers until the spring of 1915, when exhaustion and anguish compelled her to return home. The war forced her to turn away from aesthetic abstraction in her art work, and her later works expressed greater realism, particularly her memorials to the soldiers of World War I. These pieces bore titles such as At His Post, His Last Charge, His Bunkie, Private in the 15th, The Aviator, and Gassed, Blinded. After she returned to New York, she had begun throwing together masses of clay to re-create images of the soldiers she had seen, and these statues formed the foundation for her larger war memorials of the 1920’s. Whitney completed two panels for the Victory Arch in New York City as well as the Washington Heights Memorial at 168th Street and Broadway. The latter won the New York Society of Architects’ Medal as the most meritorious work of 1922. In 1926, Whitney designed a large memorial for the harbor of St. Nazaire, France, to commemorate the 1917 landing of the first American Expeditionary Forces. Sadly, the Germans destroyed this monument during World War II.

Most of Whitney’s later work of the 1920’s and 1930’s was completed at her studio in Paris. She produced significant works during these two decades that diverged from the war theme. In 1924, she produced a larger-than-life bronze equestrian statue of Colonel William F. Cody, better known as Buffalo Bill, which was eventually installed in Cody, Wyoming. Whitney then created the Columbus Monument, a 114-foot statue that was placed at the port of Palos, Spain, in 1933.

In 1934, Whitney attracted national attention not as a result of her work but because of a highly publicized child custody case concerning her niece, Gloria Vanderbilt. Whitney fought for, and won, custody of Gloria. The stress and publicity surrounding the prolonged case greatly undermined Whitney’s already failing health. She refused to give in to her illness, however, and continued to exhibit her work publicly until after the unveiling of her sculpture The Spirit of Flight at the New York World’s Fair of 1939. Three years later Whitney died, reportedly of a heart condition, at the age of sixty-seven.

Significance

Whitney is one of the few American women to hold such a prominent position in the history of American art as a traditional sculptor of public monuments. Her work as an artist is often downplayed in light of her munificence as patron of modern American art. Ironically, the founding of the Whitney Museum is often viewed as her greatest creation. Although her work as a philanthropist was crucial in generating greater respect and attention for modern American artists and their work, Whitney is equally notable for her own struggle to establish herself as a sculptor of public monuments in an era when her gender and her social background made the realization of her dream nearly impossible.

Bibliography

Auchincloss, Louis. The Vanderbilt Era: Profiles of a Gilded Age. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1989. Novelist and biographer Auchincloss examines the lives and accomplishments of the Vanderbilts of the period from 1880 to 1920. Although not focused exclusively on Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, this family history provides lively anecdotes and places her within her familial and historical context.

Biddle, Flora Miller. The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made: A Memoir. New York: Arcade, 1999. Biddle, Whitney’s granddaughter, chronicles how three generations of Whitney women, beginning with Gertrude, created an art gallery that eventually evolved into the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Dunford, Penny. Biographical Dictionary of Women Artists in Europe and America Since 1850. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990. This work contains a brief biography covering Whitney’s main works as a sculptor and her significant contributions as an art patron.

Fraser, Kennedy. “The Heiress.” Vogue, March, 1998, 468. A profile of Whitney, chronicling her life and examining her art.

Friedman, Bernard H. Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1978. Biography of the sculptor written with the research assistance of the artist’s granddaughter. This work is filled with many of Whitney’s own writings but lacks much in the way of scholarly analysis and evaluation. The book details her life and relationships, but there is little information about her art.

Patterson, Jerry E. The Vanderbilts. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1989. This dynastic biography of the Vanderbilts examines the private and public lives of various family members, including their marriages, divorces, financial dealings and business investments, and their patronage of the arts. Illustrated with numerous photographs of Vanderbilt residences and personal art holdings. Helps place Whitney within the context of her family background.

Rubinstein, Charlotte Streifer. American Women Artists: From Early Indian Times to the Present. New York: Avon Books, 1982. This collection of biographical sketches includes a readable, comprehensive, yet brief sketch on Whitney. Contains delightful anecdotes, including the fact that Whitney often worked in Turkish harem pants, turban, and turned up shoes.

Whitney Museum of American Art. Memorial Exhibition: Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. New York: Author, 1943. The introduction to this catalog is written by Juliana Force, the first director of the Whitney Museum. Force emphasizes Whitney’s career as a creator of monumental sculpture and focuses on the Whitney Museum’s works from her collection.

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