From outside, Renzo Piano’s new Whitney Museum of American Art, set beside the Hudson River, has the bulk of an oil tanker’s hull. Inside is entirely different. The galleries, with high ceilings, tall windows and soft pine-plank floors, are as airy and light-flooded as the 19th-century sailmaker’s lofts known to Herman Melville, who worked as a shipboard customs inspector where the Whitney now stands. Art feels at home in them, and the work in the museum’s top-to-bottom inaugural show is homegrown. Culled from the permanent collection, it imaginatively mixes favorites by Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keeffe and Jasper Johns with objects and artists that the Whitney had all but forgotten.
It’s good to see a new museum start with history, and the show, called “America Is Hard to See” and opening on May 1, is, on the whole, a carefully judged musing on an institutional past. That it could never have been done on the same scale at the Whitney uptown is as good a reason as any to have made a move. The new place, at the southern end of the High Line, has twice the exhibition space of the old one. Big slices of the collection can now be on full-time display, never possible before.
