Before sailing for France last week to work on her Foch Memorial, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney took time to outline her plan for a Whitney Museum of American Art, to be opened in Manhattan next November. Her thesis: there is no museum devoted exclusively to U. S. Art.*
The Museum of Modern Art lately opened in Manhattan (TIME, Sept. 16) lays no special emphasis on U. S. paintings. Such establishments as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Chicago Art Institute, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, dare not risk many purchases from modern U. S. painters.
Mrs. Whitney’s museum will encourage young U. S. artists, maintain a bureau of art information, provide a permanent exhibition of U. S. painting and sculpture. Further details Mrs. Whitney did not divulge, except that she was endowing the project herself and that, when it opened, the Whitney Museum of American Art would possess as its nucleus 400 paintings “illustrating the growth of native art.”
* The Grand Central Art Galleries, founded by philanthropic art patrons in 1923, is devoted exclusively to the exhibition and sale of U. S. art.
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