Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney #2

by Robert Henri

Title

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney #2

Artist

Robert Henri

Medium

Photograph - Oil Painting

Description

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney by Robert Henri

Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney (January 9, 1875 - April 18, 1942) was an American sculptor, art patron and collector, and founder in 1931 of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York City. She was a prominent social figure and hostess, who was born into the wealthy Vanderbilt family and married into the Whitney family.

A revolution in American art circles was led by Robert Henri (1865-1929), instigator of what was referred to as "The Eight" and the "revolutionary black gang." Henri, along with John Sloan, William Glackens, George Luks, Everett Shinn, James Preston, Edward Davis, and Charles Redfield, held academic and officially sanctioned art in contempt. They complained that it was cloistered, effete, monotonous, and "fenced in with tasseled ropes and weighed down with bronze plates."

These young artistic rebels believed that American art should be public in the broadest sense of the word and have relevance to the people, not just to art experts. According to Henri, American artists had too long been under the sway of the standards and subject matter of European high art. Henri and The Eight challenged the enshrining of European aesthetics. Following in the footsteps of novelists such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, and the essayist Henry David Thoreau, who celebrated what they called "an American spirit," Henri turned his artistic vision to native themes. By doing so, he insisted that the unique qualities of America should shape its artists and its art.

Henri was born Robert Henry Cozad on June 25, 1865 in Nebraska. He studied art at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Henri became fascinated by the realism of his teacher, Thomas Eakins, who counseled his students to study their own country and to "portray its types." To the dismay of the academy, Eakins insisted that his students paint from nude models rather than from plaster molds. Eakins's rebelliousness against the decorum of academic art cost him his job but won the admiration of Henri, who continued his studies with Eakins's gifted student, Thomas Anshutz. In 1888 Henri left for Paris and enrolled in the bastion of classicism, the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, for two years. While in Paris the radical Henri found Post-Impressionism, the European challenge to academic art, uninteresting.

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September 3rd, 2016

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