Expanded Whitney Still Missing the Big Picture

There’s something quaint about the newly opened fifth-floor expansion of the Whitney Museum of American Art--something quaint and hopeless. Quaint because the handsome galleries for the museum’s permanent collection cleverly evoke an earlier, simpler time, when Manhattan’s art history stood in for America’s; and hopeless because--well, who could possibly believe in that anymore?

The expansion of the Whitney’s Marcel Breuer-designed building, which opened to controversial reviews in 1966, has been a long time coming. In the high-flying 1980s, the museum commissioned a grandiose plan from architect-of-the-moment Michael Graves, who proposed a Pharaonic wing that would literally have subsumed Breuer’s building, turning it into a pedestal holding up one end of Graves’ blocklong expansion. Preservationists, architectural historians, neighbors on Madison Avenue and people armed only with a pair of functioning eyeballs yelled bloody murder. Revisions to the scheme came and went, and finally Graves went too.

In 1994, a different and more sober plan evolved. Two brownstones next door on 74th Street were converted into staff offices and a library. The old offices and library on the fifth floor and mezzanine of the Breuer building were designated for renovation as permanent collection galleries--the first the Whitney has had in its 67-year history--and the Manhattan design firm of Gluckman Mayner Architects was retained. Finally, the original galleries and exterior stone facade were renovated, cleaned and restored. Three years and $30 million later, the work is done.

From the street, the restoration looks great--which means the museum looks essentially as it did when it opened 30-plus years ago. Cleaning and structural work have brought back the building’s blunt crispness.

Breuer’s original design was for a Modernist fortress, shored up against the Old World brownstones of the Upper East Side. The building’s famous moat-and-drawbridge entrance on Madison Avenue set the tone of fortification, while the stepped facade and its jutting, trapezoidal windows seemed the perfect vantage from which to pour boiling oil on the scruffy rabble below.

For 1966, the image of siege and refuge for the small, beleaguered ranks of living artists seemed about right in describing 20th century American painting and sculpture. The period’s liberal agitation for social transformation only added to the building’s cogency.

By contrast, Gluckman Mayner Architects, the firm that took on the fifth-floor permanent collection rooms, are echt ‘90s Manhattan gallery designers. Breuer’s material vocabulary of stone and bronze slides seamlessly into their polished concrete and hardwood, for a svelte echo of today’s up-scale art spaces downtown in SoHo and Chelsea. In sky-sparse Manhattan, the flood of natural daylight in six of the 11 new galleries, courtesy of skylights possible on the top floor, seems a precious commodity.

The galleries are pleasant, if small (all 11 take up less than 8,000 square feet, combined), and their contents range over the first half of the 20th century. There’s a mezzanine room for photographs, which the Whitney only recently began to collect, and a gallery for prints and drawings. Mostly, though, paintings are displayed. Aside from an overcrowded gallery devoted to Alexander Calder’s mobiles, sculptures and whimsical circus of wire animals and acrobats, and a small corner space for Elie Nadelman’s plaster kewpies, only eight Modern sculptures are on view.

The Whitney’s collection of prewar American art can most politely be described as spotty. It began with the bequest of some 700 works from its founding patron, artist and philanthropist Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, but the lion’s share of works on display were acquired just in the last 25 years. Easily the most compelling room is the one devoted to Edward Hopper, whose 13 works on paper and nine paintings--including such unbeatable pictures as “Early Sunday Morning” and “A Woman in the Sun”--form a blissful oasis.

Elsewhere, it’s catch-as-catch-can. What’s disappointing is just how blandly predictable the selection seems to be.

Take the works on paper. A wall text explains that the Whitney’s focus has always been on “the work of both established and lesser-known or emerging artists,” but what follows is the standard mainstream--Sheeler, Demuth, Hopper, Guston, Bearden, Gorky--most represented by fine examples. On the few occasions when things get a bit obscure--say, two dull 1931 prints by Mabel Dwight and Gerald K. Geerling--you can be pretty sure the work will show a local artist depicting the New York scene.

Dwight, an insignificant artist who is one of only two women represented here (the other is Isabel Bishop), was the first secretary and receptionist at the Whitney Studio Club, forerunner to the Whitney Museum. The fact is telling. For the permanent collection galleries are less a survey of important American art from the first half of this century than they are a display of the Whitney Museum and its early history.

That the Whitney itself is the actual subject of the installation is announced right off the elevator. The opening gallery is meant to evoke the museum’s original 1931 space on West 8th Street, complete with charming carved-glass doors by Carl Walters and Mrs. Whitney’s own bronze fountain of Rodin-like male nudes (here used as a planter). The patron’s favorite artists--William Glackens, John Sloan and other realists of the so-called Ashcan School--are duly represented, including Robert Henri, whose brash 1916 portrait of Mrs. Whitney shows her reclining on a couch and dressed in turquoise, Orientalist harem pants.

This opening gallery sets the tone for the rest, which together exude a feeling best described as picturesque. The shuttered view of prewar American art seen in these rooms is roughly one that stretches from Manhattan’s Upper East Side all the way down and across town to 8th Street.

The Symbolist-inspired abstractions of the Transcendental Painting Group centered in New Mexico? Forget it; not here. The Surrealism of Charles Howard (abstract) or Helen Lundeberg (figurative) up and down the West Coast? Nope. You will find the totemic, post-Brancusi wooden sculptures of Louise Bourgeois, a French emigre to New York; but, even though his work was chosen for Whitney Studio Club annual exhibitions in 1925 and 1926, you won’t find the totemic, post-Brancusi sculptures of Peter Krasnow, who emigrated from New York to L.A. in 1922.

The Whitney’s parochial collection, which focuses on skirmishes fought and disputes finally adjudicated in New York, doesn’t accommodate much of anything outside the established local canon. Parochialism is inevitable for any museum (beware institutional claims to global outlook), but the Whitney would do better simply to declare its collection so--then go for broke. A pleasurable space might open up for the quirky and unexpected, which is what gives any collection character.

Instead, we face an airy chasm of often dubious quality that attends the Whitney’s phony claim to be telling the story of prewar American art.

Between the 1960s, when the Whitney’s Breuer fortress opened, and the 1990s, when the thorny issue of its expansion was resolved, something critical happened in art. The idea of a monolithic artistic center, which had passed from Paris before the war to New York after, completely fell apart. The internationalization of the art world in fact records the emergence of multiple artistic centers with diverse histories.

This decisive shift could have been acknowledged in the permanent collection galleries in one of two ways: by not confusing local history with American history; or, better still, by ranging far and wide, aggressively embracing the multiple centers of American artistic production that in fact characterized the first half of this century.

Imagine how dazzlingly progressive and cutting-edge such a presentation would have seemed to be. Instead, the Whitney now just looks provincial. Quaint, for sure, but hopeless, too.

* Whitney Museum of American Art, 945 Madison Ave., New York, N.Y., (212) 570-3676; closed Mondays and Tuesdays.