Whitney & Force

In one big capsule, Manhattan's Whitney Museum last week gave gallerygoers a history of 20th Century U.S. art. With 176 paintings and sculptures by Whitney-nurtured artists, it was staging a memorial exhibit for Juliana Force, until her death last year the museum's hardworking, fast-talking director.

Teamed with socialite Sculptress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Juliana Force did as much as anyone to pull contemporary U.S. art out of the side streets of Greenwich Village and points east & west, place it in galleries where the public could see and admire it. For when Gertrude Whitney took a studio in the Village's MacDougal Alley in 1907, the plush offices of the Fifth Avenue art dealers were still cold to all but academicians. Museums would not look twice at the work of naturalist painters such as John Sloan and William Glackens, who were sneeringly referred to as "the ashcan school."

Up & Comers. Mrs. Whitney, unlike her uptown friends who were concentrating on collecting old masters and French impressionists, decided to do what she could to encourage young hopefuls in the U.S. She opened her studio to her more promising Village neighbors, was soon holding exhibitions and buying the works of such up & comers as George Luks and Everett Shinn.

In 1914 she decided to move to bigger quarters, called on her sister-in-law's secretary, the 37-year-old wife of Dentist Willard Burdette Force, to help her out. From then on, with forceful, explosive Mrs. Force as front man, the Whitney Studio went great guns. By 1928 the Whitney Studio Club, where artists could get together and show their works, had 400 members and 400 more were clamoring to get in. Dozens of artists including Painters John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Reginald Marsh and Sculptor John B. Flannagan, had had their first one-man shows at the Whitney. Works by Whitney-sponsored artists were getting into museums, and selling on Fifth Avenue.

No Closed Shop. But in 1929, when the team of Whitney & Force tried to close up shop and retire, they found to their chagrin that modern U.S. art was still not well enough established for Manhattan's crusty Metropolitan Museum to accept Mrs. Whitney's collection, even as a gift. Ruffled and angry, they decided to go into the museum business themselves with Mrs. Force as boss.

When the Whitney opened its salmon-pink quarters on West Eighth Street in 1931, Mrs. Force continued to focus her attention on present-day U.S. artists, letting the older established museums fill in the historical background. Mrs. Whitney paid all the bills, left $2,500,000 to keep the museum going after her death in 1942. The Whitney never offered prizes, instead spent from $10,000 to $30,000 a year buying the pictures it liked. Up until her last illness, Juliana Force moved poker-backed and sharp-eyed among American artists, watching for someone who might make another Whitney "first."

The pictures hanging in the museum's pleasant galleries last week were proof that Mrs. Force's taste was catholic, usually sound. From George Luks's powerfully naturalistic study, The Wrestlers, dated 1905, to the stylized modernist canvases of Abraham Rattner and the obscure experiments of Baziotes and Gottlieb (see below), every excursion and detour of U.S. art was represented.

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