Just for fun, I attended today’s groundbreaking for the Whitney downtown — ok, not really, I had other business in the neighborhood and decided to include it on my itinerary to Chelsea and below.
For one, I stopped in at the Gagosian gallery exhibition, Picasso and Marie-Thérèse: L’Amour fou, which is worth the trip. I understand that some people are tired of Gagosian’s rolling out of these niche Picasso exhibits. But I’m not. I agree with Jerry Saltz’s review — which concludes, “As Walter herself said, ‘You don’t resist Picasso … a woman doesn’t resist Picasso.’ See this show; heed her words.”
But back to the Whitney ceremony, which took place in a tent on the spot near the High Line where Renzo Piano’s building will rise.
Despite the shovels hung from the ceiling (left), there was no ground breaking, per se, just a performance by Elizabeth Streb which had dancers jumping through glass panes and her standing under a shower of dirt, which was later turned over several times by the powers-that-be, including Mayor Bloomberg and Whitney director Adam Weinberg (below).
The whole thing struck me as more of a pep rally than a groundbreaking. Several people received standing ovations for being introduced (e.g. the founder’s granddaughter, Flora Miller Biddle), and Weinberg got a lot of foot-stomping, too. Everyone mentioned that the Whitney was returning to its roots downtown, which — after a while — sounded more like people trying to convince themselves than that they believed it now.
There is, I think, a lot of wishful thinking in the Whitney’s move — and that may or may not turn out to be a good thing. One worry: the capital campaign is far from over: Of $720 million, just over $500 million has been raised.
Still, I may rue this day, but I’m going out on a limb regarding the architecture: Piano’s design, based on the drawings and sketches I’ve seen, look pretty good (though that clunky model Piano is holding at right gives me pause) for the display of art. I have disliked many of his more recent museum projects — the Morgan Library expansion, LACMA’s Resnick pavillion, etc. The Art Institute of Chicago is having problems with its Modern wing, and we still have to see about the expansion of the Isabella Stewart Gardner, which opens next year.
But the Whitney is looking better. I’m not talking about the outside; this is about how the art will look.
Interestingly, for the Whitney, Piano got to design a whole new building, like his Beyeler Foundation, his best museum, and not an expansion, like the others I’ve mentioned. It may just be that he’s at his best with a clean sheet of paper. I’m hopeful.
The Whitney opens a new exhibit, Designing the Whitney of the Future, in is lower gallery on Thursday, where we’ll see more.
And the museum’s home page, which was flashing neon about its groundbreaking when I last checked, has also embedded a video preview of the building. UPDATE: on 5/25, the Whitney home page is back to normal, but you can still access the video.
Photo Credit: © Judith H. Dobrzynski