Art Studios Where Whitney Museum Was Born Will Admit Visitors

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The New York of Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney’s day did not respect female artists, did not prize contemporary artists and did not appreciate American artists.

Mrs. Whitney set out to change all that, working out of a crazy warren of studios and salons cobbled together a century ago from abutting townhouses and carriage houses on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village.

Her eccentric compound was the birthplace of the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1931. The museum had its headquarters there until 1954. Since 1967, the interlocked buildings have housed the New York Studio School of Drawing, Painting and Sculpture.

This would be an artistic landmark of the first order if the public were admitted on a regular basis.

Mark your calendar.

Beginning June 3, a limited number of visitors will be able to take free, 45-minute tours of Mrs. Whitney’s studios.

The tours have been made possible in part by a $30,000 grant from theNational Trust for Historic Preservation.

“We think this place is a treasure,” Stephanie K. Meeks, the president and chief executive of the trust, said, “and one that deserves more recognition for its history and more of an opportunity for the public to engage with it.”

Ms. Meeks spoke while glancing around the mystically hallucinogenic studio created for Mrs. Whitney in the late 1910s and early ’20s by Robert Winthrop Chanler, an artist with an Astor pedigree whose legacy is only now being rediscovered.

In this delirious space, formerly a hayloft, a 20-foot-tall fireplace seems to be consumed by sinuous tongues of bronze and plaster flames. They lick a ceiling awash with bas-relief figures of dragons, snakes and cephalopods, presided over by a demonically radiant sun — William Blake in three dimensions. Compounding the madness, there were once seven stained-glass windows, four of which flanked the hayloft doors.

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