Whitney director resigns

Maxwell L. Anderson, director of New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art through five stormy years, has resigned in dismay over an abandoned expansion plan and philosophical differences with the museum’s board.

“It wouldn’t be fair to my staff to be half-hearted in there,” Anderson said Tuesday.

As at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Whitney’s leaders had planned an ambitious expansion, retained Rotterdam-based architect Rem Koolhaas to design it in 2001, and then, daunted by the limping economy, backed away.

LACMA shelved its dramatic demolition-and-reconstruction plan, estimated at $300 million, in December 2002.

In the Whitney’s case, board members decided in April to shelve a plan whose cost has been estimated at $200 million. It was “an expensive but not extravagant building,” said Anderson, who argued that it was worth fighting for, and would generate more excitement than a more standard design.

Seeing its prospects fall, Anderson said, was a stinging disappointment, in part because he’d seen a similar expansion bid fall apart during his tenure as director at the Michael C. Carlos Museum at Emory University in Atlanta in the late 1980s and early 1990s.

Anderson acknowledged that he also has differed on programming issues with board members, who have sought a more conservative path.

In prepared statements Monday, the Whitney’s board president, Robert J. Hurst, and chairman, Leonard A. Lauder, praised Anderson’s energy and ambition, sidestepping issues of philosophy and the Koolhaas expansion.

During Anderson’s tenure, the museum established a conservation department; devoted more display space to its permanent collection (by redeploying some of its temporary exhibition space to hold the museum’s post-1950 holdings); and mounted shows focusing on such artists as Alice Neel, Wayne Thiebaud and Joan Mitchell, along with thematic shows exploring topics from the quilts of Gee’s Bend, Ala., to the projected image in American art of the 1960s and 1970s.

Attendance grew from about 474,000 for the 1997-98 fiscal year to 611,000 for the year that ended June 30.

But the museum also experienced substantial turnover among curators after Anderson’s announcement of a structural reorganization. Before this week’s announcement, one of the institution’s two deputy director positions was vacant.

Anderson, 47, came to the Whitney in 1998 from the director’s post at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. He said he has accepted a position as a leadership fellow at the Chief Executive Leadership Institute at the Yale School of Management, beginning in the fall.