On the far west end of a wall on the sixth floor of the new Whitney Museum of American Art hangs Frank Stella’s great and influential, black proto-Minimalist painting Die Fahne hoch! (1959). It’s raked with natural light streaming in from a giant window, making the work appear lighter on the left than on the right. Ordinarily, such an installation might cause an artist to go ballistic (though an oil painting can tolerate such indirect light) and sophisticated viewers to shake their heads in disapproval. But Whitney director Adam Weinberg says Stella approved the way the picture looks: as it might in a real person’s windowed home. The placement is subtly emblematic of the new Whitney’s enhanced spatial, visual, and social openness—a surprising humaneness, if you will, in such a gleaming new edifice.
For the opening of its new Renzo Piano building—with 50,000 square feet of indoor gallery space—the Whitney is trotting out 650 works by 400 artists in its holdings for an exhibition with a telling title from Robert Frost’s poem America Is Hard to See. In the old Marcel Breuer building on Madison Avenue—the third of four Whitney locations since its founding—what the public could see of the 22,000 works in the permanent collection was mostly confined to a measly 7,725 square feet on the fifth floor of what seems, in retrospect, a mausoleum-like edifice. So this show is less an exhibition than a reunion, in tuxes and ball gowns, where old Whitney favorites show up along with such pleasantly odd guests as a suite of gently satirical 1921 watercolors by Guy Pène du Bois, present only because the researching curators were serendipitously reminded of their existence.
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