Donor, Patron and Design Enthusiast

While Whitney’s passion for fine art is evidenced in his publications and exhibitions, he was equally passionate about modern and contemporary design. As mentioned earlier, Whitney’s last project was a book of drawings by Mattia Bonetti, a Swiss designer based in Paris. Whitney collected and commissioned furniture and design objects by Bonetti for his three residences in New York, New Canaan, and Big Sur.

In addition, Whitney gifted 75 signature designs by Philippe Starck, from chairs to flyswatters and toothbrushes, to the MoMA’s Department of Architecture and Design; and in 1999, Philip Johnson installed these objects in the exhibition, Philippe Starck: Furniture and Objects at MoMA PS1. Muschamp described Starck’s designs as “visually seductive, unusually curvilinear,”¹ and Johnson’s design as “beautiful” and “simple.”² Other furniture and objects that Whitney donated to the MoMA include Clement Meadmore’s chair, Model 248 (1963) and Mort and Beryl Marton’s cork ice bucket (1963).

These gifts are only a small example of David Whitney’s generosity and patronage. During his life he donated works by Jasper Johns, Marcel Duchamp, and Andy Warhol to several curatorial departments within The Museum of Modern Art; his Jasper Johns Research Papers, 1951–1992, containing 64 notebooks of notes on Jasper Johns’ paintings and drawings including photographs and installation photographs to The Menil Collection; George Ohr’s Petticoat Vase, c. 1898 to the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum in Biloxi, Mississippi in honor of architect Frank Gehry and his wife Berta; Meknes (1964) by Frank Stella to the U.S. State Department’s Art in Embassies Program, and five ceramic cups by Ken Price to the Worcester Art Museum in Massachusetts. He also financially supported the Glessner House Museum in Chicago, the grant-making Foundation for Contemporary Performance Arts, and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Upon his death, in addition to his bequest to the Trust for Historic Preservation, he bequeathed forty-four artworks to The Menil Collection which included a significant collection of 17 drawings by Jasper Johns, as well as his art library from his New York apartment and his curatorial papers that consisted of engagement notebooks, artist and exhibition files on David Salle, Franz Kline, Michael Heizer, Claes Oldenburg, Frank Stella, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns; his exhibitions at Art Museum of South Texas Corpus Christi; and files about Green Gallery, New York, dating from 1960–1997. His gifts to The Menil Collection and its archives formed the foundation for Jasper Johns’ catalogue raisonne,³ being organized by The Menil Collection. Whitney’s large collection of works by Johns was well known. In his diaries, Warhol drolly wrote:


      Wednesday, November 12, 1986
      A drawing of Jasper’s went for $800,000. A drawing! And I guess David Whitney must be a multimillionaire, he has so many Jasper Johnses.⁴

      Monday, January 12, 1987
      David still reminds me that he wants us to get married [after Johnson dies] and now that I hear how many Jasper Johnses he has, it would be really worth it.⁵

Whitney also bequeathed all of his ceramic pots by Dirk Van Erp to Greene & Greene’s Gamble House at the University of Southern California in Pasadena and his residence in Big Sur to the Big Sur Land Trust for the sale and use of proceeds. Following the house sale, the Land Trust established the David Whitney Legacy Fund to support the community and to care for the land of Big Sur.⁶

Similar to the Big Sur Land Trust, Whitney’s bequest to the National Trust for Historic Preservation was unrestricted and allowed for an estate sale to raise proceeds. A single owner sale was organized by Sotheby’s in November 2006 which raised over $13 million. NTHP directed these funds specifically to the site’s endowment for the maintenance and operations of the Philip Johnson Glass House.

Noteworthy, NTHP did not sell the entire contents of the estate, and in fact, kept and accessioned objects of interpretative value. This included several artworks, including paintings by David Salle and Julian Schnabel, photographs by Lynn Davis and Cindy Sherman and sculptures by Michael Heizer and Alessandro Twombly, among other works. A study collection of antique, modern and contemporary design objects and a wide-ranging library including books on art, architecture, craft, design, gardening and landscape, as well as cookbooks, fiction, and music cd’s is currently being organized, as well as an archive of personal papers, clippings, and ephemera. When seen in whole, these objects present an individual with an inquisitive mind and a broad range of interests, who creatively curated his environs to reflect his refined sensibilities. Clearly, for Whitney, beauty was a virtue to live by that extended from domestic objects into and onto museum pedestals and walls.

Irene Shum Allen
Curator and Collections Manager

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¹Herbert Muschamp, “Seductive Objects With a Sly Sting,” The New York Times, July 2, 1999
²ibid.
³Membership Bulletin, Vol. 6, Number 1, The Menil Foundation, Spring/Summer, 2007
⁴The Andy Warhol Diaries, Edited by Pat Hackett, Warner Books, 1989 (p773)
⁵ibid. (p791)
⁶Newsletter, The Big Sur Land Trust, Fall/Winter 2008-09