Speaking recently to a panel of museum curators, the former Whitney Museum Director David A. Ross referred to that museum’s permanent collection as “a complex target.” The world’s foremost institution dedicated to American art has had a “very interesting set of responsibilities towards the idea of a collection, especially since the idea of what constituted American art kept changing.”

By some curious but all too standard practice, the history of modern art in America is doled out in chapters. This story starts out with Henri and the Ashcan School, then the Stieglitz circle, the Armory show, the radical realist 1930s, the expressionist 1940s, the high modernist triumph of the 1950s, on to Pop, Minimalist, and Conceptual art. These chapters have porous borders but all unfurl under the cloud of an inferiority complex: In the last century, the American artist labored dearly to escape comparisons to their European forebears. At the Whitney Museum, the permanent collection covers all of this ground and more. Yet when asked to locate the heart of the collection, which for many is the core of every great institution, one would need to dive deeper into the story that begins with Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s various artistic and philanthropic activities in support of artists in New York. In 1907, Mrs. Whitney began organizing exhibitions and then, in 1918, she established the Whitney Studio Club, an incubator of sorts for John Sloan, Edward Hopper, Guy Pène du Bois, and many others. Shortly after the Metropolitan Museum of