6. Whitney Museum of American Art

Inside the studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney

In 1929, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, daughter of Cornelius Vanderbilt II, had offered her collection of 500 Modern works by American artists to the Metropolitan Museum of Art with an endowment, but was rejected. The Whitney Museum of American Art was founded a year later, and opened in 1931 in its first home at West 8th Street, in the studio of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney in Greenwich Village. In 1954, the Museum moved uptown to West 54th Street and within a decade moved to a new home at Madison Avenue in a building by Marcel Breuer. This location is now home to the Met Breuer, where the Metropolitan Museum of Art is housing, fittingly, its contemporary art exhibitions now that the Whitney has moved back downtown to its new Renzo-Piano designed building adjacent to the High Line.