Whitney Museum of American Art

A world famous center of American Art, the Whitney Museum's Permanent Collection is housed in a striking granite building designed by Bauhaus-trained architect Marcel Breuer. Since the Museum's opening in 1931, the collection has grown to more than 12,000 paintings, sculptures, prints, drawings, and photographs, representing nearly 2,000 individual artists and providing the most complete overview of twentieth-century American art of any museum in the world. The collection is also recognized for its in-depth commitment to a number of key artists. From the first half of the century, such seminal figures as Edward Hopper, Alexander Calder, Reginald Marsh, and Stuart Davis are richly represented. In the latter half of the century, the Museum has committed considerable resources toward acquiring a large body of works by Louise Nevelson, Agnes Martin, Claes Oldenburg, Alex Katz, Ad Reinhardt, and others. The Museum's recent decision to dedicate two entire floors to the display of the Permanent Collection reaffirms the collection's central role in the Whitney Museum experience.

The Museum was founded in 1931 with a core group of 700 art objects, many of them from the personal collection of founder Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney; others were purchased by Mrs. Whitney at the time of the opening to provide a more thorough overview of American art in the early decades of the century. Mrs. Whitney favored the art of the revolutionary artists derisively called the Ashcan School, among them John Sloan, George Luks, and Everett Shinn, as well as realists such as Edward Hopper and American Scene painters John Steuart Curry and Thomas Hart Benton. Her initial gift, however, also comprised many important works by early modernists—Stuart Davis, Charles Demuth, Charles Sheeler, Max Weber, and others.