On 8th Street

Until last week there was no museum in the land devoted exclusively to U. S. Art. There were galleries, there were dealers, there were magazines increasingly eager to preach the American renaissance. But a Museum, a repository of the Muses, that was lacking. Last week about a thousand guests, carefully handpicked, assembled in a handsomely remodeled building on 8th Street (Greenwich Village) to hear a curious assortment of New Yorkers--Alfred Emanuel Smith, Congressman Robert Low Bacon, Subsidizer Otto Hermann Kahn, Sentimentalist Christopher Morley, Donor Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney--speak over a nationwide radio hookup to dedicate the Whitney Museum of American Art. Herbert Clark Hoover did not come but even he sent a message.

Nearly 40 years ago Cornelius Vanderbilt Sr. and his sister-in-law Mrs. William K. Vanderbilt (later Mrs. Oliver H. P. Belmont) fought a battle for the leadership of the Vanderbilt Clan. Their respective daughters Gertrude and Consuelo were unwilling pawns. Cornelius moved first by building an enormous renaissance palazzo known as "The Breakers," giving his gawky, good-natured daughter Gertrude a magnificent Newport coming-out party. Mrs. Willie K. countered that by marrying her quiet, handsome daughter Consuelo to Charles Richard John Spencer-Churchill, Duke of Marlborough, and giving New York the most widely discussed wedding it had ever known. The two cousins Gertrude and Consuelo have remained good friends, but their enthusiasm for Society fiestas was permanently dampened. Cousin Gertrude married her neighbor, handsome, polo-playing Harry Payne Whitney, inherited a great deal of money, bore him three children and became vitally interested in art.

She studied sculpture under James Eraser and took a course at Manhattan's Art Students' League. In 1907 she set up a studio at the end of MacDougal Alley next to that of Daniel Chester French. MacDougal Alley is a cement-paved cul de sac in Greenwich Village, lined with little brick houses that once were the stables for the great houses on Washington Square. Mrs. Whitney certainly did not invent Greenwich Village as the centre of New York's art life, but her coming there attracted public attention to it. From the first her studio was as full of painters and sculptors as sculpture. In the days when U. S. dealers would not touch the work of U. S. modernists with a forked stick, she turned two rooms of her studio into a temporary gallery and held exhibitions for her proteges. In 1914 the group that used to gather there formed the Whitney Studio Club: John Sloan, Robert Winthrop Chanler, Robert Henri, George Luks, Jo Davidson, Paul Manship and a dozen others since generally recognized as the pilgrim fathers of modern U. S. art.

In 1928 the Whitney Studio Club, which now had more than 400 members, felt that it had outlived its usefulness. The principles it was striving for were generally accepted; most of the members had achieved recognition. Dealers were anxious to show their works. Greenwich Village was no longer an art centre but a sort of midway of speakeasies, tea and gift shoppes. Art dealers moved uptown and settled in a row on 57th Street. Serious artists who could afford it moved near them. The club disbanded. Mrs. Whitney bought the old Daniel Chester French studio on one side and the home of small chic, deep-voiced Mrs. Juliana Force (now the Museum's director) on the other, and ordered the three buildings remodeled to house the Whitney Museum of American Art, a shrine not only to U. S. painting and sculpture but to the Greenwich Village that was. Even so the Whitney Museum has turned its back on MacDougal Alley. The building's handsome new facade is on the other side, on 8th Street. The contract was given to the little known architectural firm of Noel & Miller. They produced a yellowish pink building. The color, they gravely announced, was copied from that of the old houses in the Moroccan city of Marrakesh. The design is definitely modern, but leaning heavily on classical details. There are nine exhibition rooms, a sculpture room, print rooms, and an extensive library in the building. Nucleus of the Museum's collection were the 500 pictures and sculptures which Mrs. Whitney has been buying for herself during the past 20 years. At least 200 more objects have been bought and the collection is already far too large to be shown at one time. Mmes Whitney & Force plan to keep two galleries for temporary loan exhibitions in the manner of the old Studio Club, to change the sections of their permanent collection on view from month to month. The Whitney Museum is by no means devoted solely to modern U. S. art. The chosen who crowded the building's opening day last week saw works by Daniel Chester French and the 1890 impeccables as well as such modernists as Charles Burchfield, Thomas Berton and Peter Blume. Among important items are George Bellows' great canvas of the Dempsey-Firpo Fight; George Luks's portrait of Mrs. Gamley clutching a white rooster; Eugene Speicher's "Portrait of Fira Barchak," "Crescendo" by Arthur B. Davies (now valued at $25,000; Mrs. Whitney was considered extravagant in spending $1,000 for it); a Tahitian idyll by cadaverous John LaFarge.

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