New Impresario for the Showcase

In the year since it moved into its magnificent new $6,000,000 building, Manhattan's 37-year-old Whitney Museum has forged into the lead as the city's—and the nation's—handsomest and most dynamic showcase for contemporary U.S. art. Under the directorship of scholarly Lloyd Goodrich, the nation's ranking authority on Winslow Homer and Thomas Eakins, the Whitney has played host to artists as varied as Realist Andrew Wyeth and Environmentalist Louise Nevelson, while its annual displays of works by younger artists continue to spotlight the latest trends. Last week the Whitney announced that Goodrich, now 70 and with the museum since its founding in 1930, will retire as of Jan. 1.

The new impresario will be lanky, Connecticut-born and Yale-educated John Ireland Howe Baur, 58, the museum's associate director and the man who was in charge of getting the new Whitney Museum built. Baur plans to continue the museum's open-minded policies, expanding them in order to ensure broader representation of artists from outside New York City. "There's a bubbling over of creative energy in every direction today," he says, "and the injection of new talent and new movements gets more frenetic all the time. However, new movements tend to overshadow artists doing good work in older styles, and that's why it is important to maintain a catholic point of view. It isn't the movement that counts as much as the individual painter."