Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney: Sculptor, Collector, Museum Founder

Despite the lack of support from her family and husband, Harry Payne Whitney, she soldiered on with her career as an artist. And, in 1929 when the Metropolitan Museum of Art rejected her offer of the gift of nearly 700 artworks from her collection, Vanderbilt Whitney was undaunted. In response to that rejection, she established the Whitney Museum of American Art to house and present these works, opening it to the public in 1931. 

The MET’s reason for rejecting such a generous offer, which astoundingly included the funding to construct a building to display the artworks, was that they “only collected European art.” American art was considered provincial in the first decades of the 20th century, not worthy of the museum’s recognition. The goal of the newly founded Whitney Museum to embrace Modernism, particularly American Modernism, launched the shift of the center of the art world from Paris to New York.

Born into great wealth in New York City in 1875, her childhood was split between the Vanderbilt mansion on 5th Avenue and The Breakers, the spectacular family summer home on Rhode Island's “Gold Coast.” In an 1888 portrait of Gertrude at the age of 13 by the well-regarded, pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais (1829-1896), we find a young woman wearing a long white dress. Her stoic expression tells us she is momentarily resigned to being the subject of a painting, rather than the maker of art.

Even then, Vanderbilt Whitney was expressing a strong urge to create, drawing in her private journals. She went on to study art in Europe and at the Art Students League in NYC. Her net worth grew significantly through marriage at the age of 21 to Harry Payne Whitney, a wealthy businessman whose riches came from banking, oil, and tobacco. They had three children.

Early in her career as a sculptor, Vanderbilt Whitney practiced under a pseudonym. She rightly felt her position as a rich socialite would be held against her. She also understood that a man would have been taken more seriously as an artist, and that although her wealth gave her certain freedom, it was a double-edged sword. She would be criticized if she took sculpture commissions when other artists were more needy, but also blamed for undercutting the market if she worked for free.

Despite her dilemma, she completed successful public artworks internationally including the WWI Mitchel Square Memorial in NYC, the Titanic Memorial in Washington D.C., and the Three Graces at McGill University in Montreal, Quebec. She also participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions where smaller figurative works, created mainly in her Paris studio, were shown.

The first painting to enter Vanderbilt Whitney’s private collection was a commissioned portrait in 1916 by the American realist painter Robert Henri (1865-1929). Henri became a prominent leader of the Ashcan School, a group of American artists that spurned Impressionism and academic work and embraced the gritty realities of urban life. Recumbent in a pose reminiscent of Manet’s nude Olympia, this muse was dressed in vivid green “pants,” unusual for a woman of her status at that time. She is self-possessed, a thoroughly modern woman. True to form, her husband would not allow the painting to be hung in their home. 

By 1916, Vanderbilt Whitney had founded the Whitney Studio in Greenwich Village, a precursor to the Whitney Museum. It became an important venue to support the exhibition of new American art. The Whitney Biennial is one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the New York contemporary art scene. Started as an annual by Vanderbilt Whitney, it never fails to invite controversy. Given the current volatility of the art market, the upcoming Biennial, scheduled to open in March 2026, is sure to command attention and ignite heated discussion, just as Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney would have wanted.