╕PARA ░PAR@ ` TEXT ` ·Whitney, Gertrude Vanderbilt
1875╨1942
sculptor and art patron
Born in New York City on January 9, 1875, Gertrude Vanderbilt was a great-granddaughter of Commodore Cornelius Vanderbilt, founder of one of America╒s great fortunes. She was educated by tutors and at the Brearley School in New York City. In August 1896 she married Harry Payne Whitney, a financier and internationally known sportsman. She had from childhood displayed an interest in and talent for art, and soon after her marriage she began studying sculpture under Hendrik Christian Andersen and James E. Farceur and then at the Art Students╒ League. Later she studied under Andrew O╒Connor in Paris, where she also received some help from Auguste Rodin.
At the Pan-American Exposition in Buffalo, New York, in 1901 she exhibited a life-size ideal figure, ╥Aspiration.╙ She exhibited work at the Louisiana Purchase Exposition in St. Louis in 1904, and she won awards in the New York Architectural League╒s competition in 1908 for her ╥Pan╙ and at the National Academy of Design in 1910 for ╥Paganism Immortal.╙ Following the latter success she abandoned the use of pseudonyms and worked under her own name, her social position notwithstanding.
From 1907 Whitney maintained a studio in Greenwich Village, where she came to know 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 artists╤including, in addition to those mentioned, Joseph Stella, Charles Sheeler, Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper, John Steuart Curry, and Stuart Davis╤her own collection of contemporary American art grew apace. In 1929 she offered the entire collection of nearly 500 pieces to the Metropolitan Museum of Art along with an endowment to build a new wing to house it; the Metropolitan rejected the offer out of hand. She then established the Whitney Museum of American Art, which opened in November 1931 under Force╒s direction. Her patronage of the arts included also the support of the Society of Independent Artists for 15 years after its founding in 1917 and of the journal The Arts in the 1920s.
In the meantime her own work in sculpture enjoyed continuing success. Major works of hers included the terra cotta ╥Aztec Fountain╙ for the Pan American Union Building in Washington, D.C., in 1912; the ╥El Dorado Fountain,╙ which won a medal at the Panama╨Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco in 1915; two panels for the Victory Arch in New York City (conveying the deep impression made on her by her relief work in World War I, when she established and worked in a field hospital in Juilly, France), 1920; the Washington Heights War Memorial, New York City, 1921, which won a medal from the New York Society of Architects; a statue of ╥Buffalo Bill╙ Cody for Cody, Wyoming, 1922; a monument for St. Nazaire, France, commemorating the first landing of American troops, 1926; the Titanic Memorial for Potomac Park, Washington, D.C., 1931; the Columbus Monument for the harbor of Palos, Spain, 1933; the Peter Stuyvesant Monument in Stuyvesant Square, New York, 1939; and ╥The Spirit of Flight╙ for the New York World╒s Fair of 1939╨1940.
She was elected an associate of the National Academy of Design in 1940. During 1934╨1935 she fought a widely publicized court battle for custody of her niece, Gloria Vanderbilt. She died in New York City on April 18, 1942.
vstyl ` ! ¬ 5¬ ' 5¬ @ !I ╫ 5¬ ╪ !I ─ 5¬ ┼ !I c !I ▐ s !I è 5¬ ï !I Γ !I Ω !I · 5¬ √ !I 5¬ !I link ` HYPR c s
