Culture | Manhattan’s new Whitney

Don’t be aloof

The museum of American art should have been gutsier

Too courtly
|NEW YORK

FOR Renzo Piano, an Italian architect whose speciality is geometrically immaculate refinement, the $422m new Whitney Museum, which opens on May 1st, is a startling, aggressive departure. Mr Piano has hoisted seven massive floors above a full-length lobby walled in glass. The fifth floor broadens into a hammerhead aimed at the High Line park to the east. Projecting out like artillery from the three top levels are a series of metal stairs.

In New York’s Meatpacking district, this block-long collision of forms in concrete, painted steel and glass wedges itself into the jumble of neighbouring buildings like a teenage boy—all hips and elbows. Yet Mr Piano also cleaves to his characteristic elegance; the walls shape late-afternoon river reflections that seep up Gansevoort Street, setting the sleek glass lobby aglow.

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney founded her museum of American art in 1930 around a coterie of genteel social-realists dubbed the Ashcan school. The Whitney quickly took on the heterogenous characteristics of America itself, particularly its urban side. Prior to this latest incarnation, Mr Piano and two architectural predecessors (the late Michael Graves and Rem Koolhaas) proposed designs expanding the forbidding Upper East Side home that Marcel Breuer had designed for it in 1966. All were vetoed by the Whitney’s proprietary, well-heeled neighbours. For the museum, decamping to the Meatpacking district has resulted in a much larger site.

Inside, it often works well. The building offers the museum a 50% increase in exhibition space. In space-strangled Manhattan, the value of such generosity is hard to overstate. Lifts open directly onto art-display space, as they did in the former Whitney, so you immediately encounter work ranging from Alexander Calder’s “Calder’s Circus” (introducing the theme of spectacle and mass entertainment) to “He Kills Me”, a diptych by Donald Moffett, an AIDS activist, showing a pulsing orange target alongside a photo of Ronald Reagan.

On each floor, the length of the gallery gently entices the visitor to wander from one end to another. Loosely partitioned, the displays flow into each other, which can urge movement rather than contemplation. Occasional long vistas, where daylight at either end beckons, set up a conversation among numerous works at once. Throughout, the conventional line-up of individual objects is interrupted by tight groupings of items that offer context, often with explicit political or social agendas, from labour rights to civil rights.

Mr Piano is famous for his ethereal galleries that are lit from above and his expanses of glass, but daylight and views make only tentative forays here. A sawtooth roof draws enlivening north light into the smallish top floor. Shades will obscure extraordinary river and city views much of the time to keep out the searing morning and afternoon light. Those shades will also limit intended glances by passers-by into the full-height windows on the fifth floor, where Glenn Ligon’s neon “Negro Sunshine” faces the city, and Jonathan Borofsky’s “Running People at 2,616,216” looks out on Hudson River Park.

Sculpture terraces tumble down towards the High Line, linked by military-grey stairways. Knobby stainless-steel sculptures by Tony Smith and angular geometric metal forms by Robert Morris contrast with the jumbled city beyond. From surrounding streets, the visible movement of visitors brings the building alive.

When the area swarmed with meatpackers, trains delivered squealing pigs on the elevated track that has been converted to the High Line. For years prostitutes plied the surrounding streets, sharing them with drug dealers and drag queens. It’s the kind of milieu that was often recorded, if not inhabited, by the artists the Whitney collects. But only briefly, for example in the terraces, does Mr Piano connect visitors to the rich stories the cityscape has to tell. The untidiness of the architect’s composition wants to engage the surroundings, but there is no frisson here. Mr Piano is courtly when he needs to be gutsy, even operatic. His bespoke details—like the lushly rounded steel panels—play to the district’s luxe homogenisation. The new Whitney should inhabit the city, not sit aloof from it.

This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Don’t be aloof"

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