Whitney Donor Vows to Stop Gifts

An art installation portraying Mayor Rudolph W. Giuliani in the company of Nazis at an upcoming Whitney Museum exhibit has angered one of the museum’s largest benefactors, who says she will stop giving the institution money.

The piece, “Sanitation,” by Hans Haacke, upset 73-year-old heiress Marylou Whitney so much that she has told the museum director that in addition to halting donations, she will quit its national fund-raising board as well.

The installation piece consists of a wall lined with garbage cans, each containing a speaker playing audio of marching troops. A gold-framed reproduction of the 1st Amendment would be on the wall, along with six quotations--three from the mayor--written in the Gothic typescript favored by Adolf Hitler.

The mayor’s quotations refer to “Sensation,” a controversial Brooklyn Museum exhibit that featured a portrait of the Virgin Mary with a clump of elephant dung. Giuliani unsuccessfully sought to stop city funding of the museum because of the piece.

Whitney, whose mother-in-law, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, founded the Whitney Museum, told the New York Post in Saturday’s editions she wished that “they could take the Whitney name off that museum.”

Museum Director Maxwell Anderson said in a statement that he regretted any discomfort “pursuit of the artistic mission established by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in 1930” might have caused.