‘Friday File’: The Whitney Museum’s 1966 Opening

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50 Years Ago

The Whitney has moved on to its fancy new digs. It has left the old place — shuttered for two years — to renters. Don’t worry, the tenant won’t trash the building. It’s the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it has a healthy respect for history. When the Met Breuer is unveiled next week, the building, inside and out, will be largely unchanged from when it opened in 1966.

Here’s how the The New York Times covered that opening. Milton Esterow, the former longtime owner of ARTnews but then a reporter for The Times, started things off:

“Three weeks before its public opening,” Mr. Esterow wrote on Sept. 8, “the museum has generated something of a debate among curbside critics.” Who were not wholly pleased. “Comments on Madison Avenue yesterday,” he reported, “ranged from ‘it looks like a fortress’ and ‘it looks like a garage’ to ‘it’s striking,’ ‘romantic’ and ‘they ought to tear it down and build it rightside-up.’”

Ada Louise Huxtable, the Times architecture critic, who went on to win the first Pulitzer Prize awarded for criticism, was an early champion of the building, and her appraisal appeared the same day. Saying it had “an extraordinary urbanity,” she spoke to some of the concerns of the curbside critics.

“The taste for the disconcertingly top-heavy, inverted pyramidal mass grows on one slowly,” she wrote, “like a taste for olives or warm beer.”

Ms. Huxtable served up a few olives.

On the courtyard:

“The virtually windowless structure gains gallery space through its cantilevered upper floors, and digs into the ground for a glass-walled floor below grade that opens onto a sunken sculpture court. Viewed from the street, the court has a suggestion of the jailyard, not entirely dispelled by the stony severity inside or the gum wrappers dropped from the entrance bridge that crosses it. But gum wrappers are pop art, and the view from below is impressive.”

On the materials:

“The trick — and again the hand is quicker than the eye — is the subtly scooped curve of a stone stair riser, the shape of a teak rail, or the juxtaposition of a rough-surfaced concrete wall with the extravagant luxury of massive, silky bronze doors. The ‘close-to-earth’ materials have all the peasant simplicity of Marie Antoinette playing farmgirl in the hamlet at Versailles.”

On its suitability as a home for art:

“A superb artificial environment for an art that maintains it is part of its time, but thrives best in hothouse isolation. The Whitney is a splendid hothouse.”

And:

“The exhibits are now being installed, and it is sometimes difficult to distinguish art from artifact. There is a curious mixture of crushed automobile fenders (sculpture), objets trouvés (art), and electric tools and equipment (construction). It is rumored that a shovel stood by a wall for a week until its status was settled.”

The Times checked in again for the gala opening. “During the party, at 9:15 P.M., the museum received a telephone warning that a bomb had been placed in the museum,” Dan Sullivan reported. “A detachment of police searched the building but found nothing.”

Marcel Breuer, for whom the building is now named, was on hand at the gala.

“The 64-year-old architect was in a genial mood,” Mr. Sullivan wrote. “‘Breuer: B-R-O-Y-E-R,’ he joked to someone who didn’t know how to spell his name. He was asked if he could compare this day in his life, this milestone, with any other. ‘Well … the day I was born,’ Mr. Breuer replied, ‘That was a great day.’”

He commented more seriously on his creation.

“The exterior may be something of ‘a surprise in the cityscape,’ Mr. Breuer said, but the interior of the museum subordinates itself to the works of art it contains. ‘Outside, it is expression; inside, only proportion. It stands back and lets you see the pictures.’”

Finally, on Oct. 2, there were twin reviews — from Ms. Huxtable again and from the art critic John Canaday. Both cheered the building. Mr. Canaday began by commenting on the museum’s previous home. “The old Whitney building was just a dead weight, a suffocation,” he wrote, that the museum “had managed to fob off” on the Museum of Modern Art. “But nevertheless it was an out, since a critic was always tempted to be kind to a Whitney show for the same reasons that one might cheer a one-legged man in a cross-country race. He didn’t stand a chance of winning, but it was damned game of him even to enter.”

But the Whitney had now “won brilliantly with a building that works beautifully as exhibition space, and, furthermore, has installed an opening exhibition, ‘Art of the United States: 1670-1966,’ of such excellence that no excuses need be made for it.”

Mr. Canaday had long made clear that he thought excuses often needed to be made in the case of, for example, Abstract Expressionists, a great number of whom he saw as “charlatans” and “freaks.” He alluded to this in his comments about the last part of the Whitney show:

“In its terminal section, where we come to the immediately current vogues, there is an uncomfortable feeling that these vast canvases are not paying their way on the expensive new walls they occupy, that they are parasites upon the building. But there is nothing wrong with the Whitney’s selection that is not wrong with American art at the moment.”

Which in part was this:

“The most encouraging thing about the Whitney’s rebirth is that it might become, truly, the Museum of American Art that it is called, rather than the Museum of New York Art that it has become.”

Ms. Huxtable’s review stayed with the architecture. The intervening weeks had not silenced the naysayers.

“At the moment, the most disliked building in New York is undoubtedly the Whitney Museum,” she wrote. “It seems that almost everyone’s feelings have been violated by this brashly unconventional structure on the suave upper reaches of Madison Avenue. Still, it fascinates.”

And it did.

“Like that fine old saying about sin, first the Whitney repulses; then it intrigues; and finally,” Ms. Huxtable wrote, “it is embraced.”