In 1929, the New York sculptor, collector and heiress Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney offered her collection of contemporary American art, which at that time included works by George Bellows, Everett Shinn and Charles Demuth, to the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Edward Robinson. But he dismissed the offer with an offhand, “What will we do with them, my dear lady? We have a cellar full of those things already.” This rejection was the spur to her creation of the Whitney Museum of American Art; some 85 years later, on 1 May, it admitted the public to its new Renzo Piano-designed building on Manhattan’s Gansevoort Street. Its eight storeys of glass and terraces overlook the elevated urban garden of the High Line to the east, the belching traffic of 10th Avenue and