The Guggenheim Museum vs. The Whitney Museum Comparison

A Brief History

Established by socialite Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney  in 1930, the Whitney Museum has enjoyed several locations, most notably Madison Avenue, where it spent five decades. It relocated to a building designed by Renzo Piano, at the southern entrance to the High Line park in the Meatpacking District, in 2015. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum was established in 1939 by Guggenheim and artist Hilla von Rebay and has been in its extraordinary Frank Lloyd Wright-designed home on the Upper East Side since 1959. 

Collections

The Whitney and the Guggenheim are all about quality over quantity. The Whitney’s collection of mostly American art runs to around 25,000 pieces, while the Guggenheim’s European-leaning collection contains more like 8,000 works.

Art and Architecture

It’s kind of impossible to consider the collection inside the Guggenheim Museum without also taking a gander at the building that contains it. With its flowing rotunda-like shape, spiral-clad exterior, soaring atrium and geometric design by maestro Frank Lloyd Wright, the Guggenheim is a work of art in its own right. Inside, works are exhibited in a bright, open space, unimpeded by internal walls and with no separation of pieces by artist or time period. Spot iconic paintings by some of the greatest artists the world has even produced, among them many examples of 20th-century Expressionism and Surrealism. Artists including Paul Klee, Kurt Schwitters and Joan Miró are well-represented here, keeping company with the likes of Gauguin, van Gogh, Pissarro, Manet, Cézanne and Jackson Pollock.

The sculptural brick-and-glass that is The Whitney’s current home was designed by renowned architect Renzo Piano and nods to the Meatpacking District’s industrial past. The building makes the best of its location overlooking the High Line’s southern entrance, with around 13,000 square feet of terraces and outdoor exhibition space facing this much-loved New York park. Inside, an additional 50,000 square feet of gallery showcases the work of some 2,000 modern and contemporary American masters, with a permanent collection that includes the likes of Georgia O’Keeffe, Willem de Kooning, Jasper Johns and Edward Hopper. Indeed, The Whitney holds the entire Hopper estate and, as such, the largest archive of his work anywhere on the planet. But it’s the temporary exhibitions of (mostly) contemporary artists that draw the biggest crowds, particularly the prestigious Whitney Biennial, an always-controversial review of the US contemporary art scene that's held here every two years.

Annual Visitors

The Guggenheim edges it, with around 860,000 annual visitors to The Whitney’s 770,000. 

Did you know...?

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Selected Highlights of the Guggenheim Museum

• The Thannhauser Collection is worth a couple of hours of anyone's time, featuring as it does a number of important Impressionist and Post-Impressionist pieces by the likes of Manet, Pissarro, Gauguin, van Gogh and, especially, Picasso. Don’t miss the maestro’s stunning ‘Woman with Yellow Hair’ from 1931.
• Vasily Kandinsky’s ‘Composition 8’ (1923) is a perennial favorite at the museum, thanks to its abstract use of shapes and colors. A must-see, it’s just one of many Kandinsky pieces held by The Guggenheim.
• The clue’s in the name of Modigliani’s 1917 ‘Nude’, a show-stopping piece in the artist’s characteristic modern style.
• Unmistakably Paul Klee, ‘Red Balloon’ (1922) is a gauzy, colorful cityscape rendered in floating geometric shapes. Strangely mesmerizing.

Selected Highlights of the Whitney Museum

• The Whitney’s Edward Hopper collection is second-to-none. Check out the Depression-era ‘Early Sunday Morning' and the cinematic beauty of ‘A Woman in the Sun’ and ‘Second Story Sunlight’, both from the early 1960s.
• The works of American sculptor Alexander Calder are also well-represented at the museum. Don’t miss his signature piece ‘Calder’s Circus’ (1926-31), a modernist masterpiece in wire and wood with nearly 200 individual pieces depicting lion tamers, fire eaters, ringmasters and more.
• Alice Neel’s 1970 intimate portrait of Andy Warhol depicts the Pop Art pioneer in a vulnerable condition, complete with sagging body, scarred torso, stick-thin arms and orthopedic underwear.
• A standout among the many Georgia O’Keeffe pieces on display at The Whitney, ‘Music, Pink and Blue No. 2’ (1918) uses gentle curves and vibrant pastels to conjure the rhythms and harmonies of nature.

Let’s be honest: neither of these museums is so large that you couldn’t fit in both and, indeed, The Whitney and The Guggenheim tend to complement rather than compete with each other. Into Impressionism and Post-Impressionism? The Guggenheim has your back, with a collection that features van Gogh, Manet and Picasso pieces galore. More of a modernist? Paintings by Hopper and sculpture by the likes of Alexander Calder are among the highlights at The Whitney. Meanwhile abstract art (Kandinsky, Schwitters et al) tends to be the point at which the two galleries meet.

Don’t forget, you can visit both, plus over 100 more NYC attractions with a New York Pass. Find out more here.