David Whitney’s extraordinary bequest to The Menil Collection

Sunday, 13 May 2007 23:42

HOUSTON, TX - This exhibition reveals to the public for the first time David Whitney’s extraordinary bequest to The Menil Collection.  A curator, art advisor, collector, and former trustee of The Menil Collection and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, David Whitney (1939 – 2005) was a pioneer in modern and contemporary art scholarship.  He worked closely with many major artists of the 20 th century, including Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns, Claes Oldenburg, and Robert Rauschenberg.  Curated by Franklin Sirmans, the Menil’s curator of modern and contemporary art, The David Whitney Bequest will be on view through October 28, 2007.

Artists and collectors admired Whitney’s discerning eye, and his great passion forAt the age of twenty-one, Whitney gained entrée into At the age of twenty-one, Whitney gained entrée into the New York art scene through an auspicious meeting with Philip Johnson.  A student of architecture at the Rhode Island School of Design, Whitney attended a lecture by Johnson at nearby Brown University.  Seizing the opportunity to introduce himself, Whitney approached the architect, who invited him to visit his fabled Glass House in New Canaan, Connecticut. Whitney visited the next weekend, beginning a relationship with Johnson that would last forty years.  While Johnson’s fame as an architect continued to blossom over the following decades, Whitney pursued his own successful career as a curator and became a well-known figure in the New York art world – to the extent of participating in a “happening” staged by Claes Oldenburg.

Whitney had a remarkable ability to expand our ways of thinking about art through his innovative gatherings of disparate objects, often juxtaposing well-known artists and classic works of Pop Art with the relatively unknown.  The David Whitney Bequest includes thirty extraordinary works, such as a drawing by Roy Lichtenstein, solvent transfer drawings by Robert Rauschenberg, a Claes Oldenburg drawing for a proposed clothespin skyscraper, silk-screened portraits by Andy Warhol, and Ken Price ceramics.  These artists are joined by the contemporary artist Steve Wolfe and his carefully crafted trompe-l’oeil sculptures of books.

The heart of Whitney’s bequest is a group of seventeen drawings by Jasper Johns (eight of which are on view). Considered one of the most significant private collections of Johns’s work on paper, these drawings include pivotal studies for major paintings, including the flags and targets of the 1950s.  One highlight of the group is the museum’s first acquisition of a Johns work in ink on plastic, a medium the artist began experimenting with in the early 1960s.

David Whitney, curator of Johns’s first major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1977, had previously donated ephemera and clippings to the Menil archives, as well as more than 1,000 books on modern art to the museum’s library. Additionally, Whitney gave sixty-three volumes of notebooks to the Menil. Documenting Johns’s oeuvre from 1951 to 1992, the notebooks promise to serve as a foundation for a future catalogue raisonné and establish The Menil Collection as one of the premier centers for research on the artist.

Beyond his curatorial expertise, David Whitney was an art enthusiast who dedicated himself to the artists who inspired him, including Cy Twombly and Eric Fischl.  In addition to life-long friendships, he monitored their progress by maintaining meticulous records of their exhibition histories and bibliographies.  This selection from his holdings, generously bequeathed to The Menil Collection upon his death, is a reflection not only of the art Whitney owned, but of the artists he promoted over the course of his career.

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