March 23, 2000 | Read Time: 1 minute
Controversy over an exhibit has prompted Marylou Whitney, a descendant of the founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art, to resign from the institution’s national fund-raising committee. She said that she would no longer give any financial support to the institution and that the museum has been withdrawn as a beneficiary of her will.
The exhibit at issue includes an artwork that compares New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani and other conservative political figures to Nazis. The piece is scheduled to be displayed in the Whitney “Biennial” show, a contemporary art exhibit held every other year at the New York museum.
Ms. Whitney said she supports the right of the museum to display the artwork but withdrew her support because she does not want to be personally associated with it. She said the controversial piece would trivialize the realities of the Holocaust.
Ms. Whitney said she was so offended that a $1-million gift she had earmarked for the Whitney Museum will now go to the Whitney Gallery of Western Art, in Cody, Wyo.
Whitney Museum officials said they were unaware that Ms. Whitney had planned to give the museum a major gift, or that she had designated it as a beneficiary in her will. As a member of the museum’s national committee, she gave at least $5,000 a year and was involved in fund-raising luncheons.
The museum was founded in 1931 by her mother-in-law, Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney.
Maxwell L. Anderson, the museum’s director, has not commented publicly on Ms. Whitney’s actions, but has defended the display of the artwork, noting that the artist’s intention was “to remind us of the worst excesses of suppressing free speech.”
