The artist, heiress and collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney established the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931 in back of her studio in some row houses at 10-14 West Eighth Street. In the 1950s the Whitney jumped to a small structure behind the Museum of Modern Art. In 1961 the museum enlarged its board — to include, for instance, Mrs. Kennedy — and began seeking a site for a larger building.
The board found just the spot at the southeast corner of Madison and 75th Street, which was owned by the developer and art collector Ian Woodner. He had cleared it of a little group of houses. Mr. Woodner, who had intended to erect an apartment house, agreed to sell the property to the Whitney.
The board, despite a mission to encourage American art, hired the architect Marcel Breuer, who was Hungarian-born and Bauhaus-trained, to design a building.
A 1963 rendering of the museum shows it almost as it stands, projecting out over Madison Avenue like a medieval fortress, with oddly shaped windows reminiscent of the gun ports of the Maginot Line. But in the rendering the panels of granite are variegated in tone, giving the building a life it does not have today with its more uniform masonry.
…/…The Whitney opened in 1966, …
