The Whitney Women and the Museum They Made: A Family Memoir

Until Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney opened her studio on Eighth Street in Manhattan in 1914—which evolved into the Whitney Museum almost two decades later—there were few art museums in the United States, let alone galleries, for contemporary artists to exhibit their work. When the mansions of the wealthy cried out for decorative art, they sought it from Europe, then the art capital of the world. It was in her tiny sculptor’s studio in Greenwich Village that Whitney began holding exhibitions o...