The Blue Whale
Museum exhibition department · 1969, renovated 2003
Enter the Hall of Ocean Life on the upper level and the whole room seems to belong to one animal. A blue whale nearly thirty metres long hangs from the ceiling in a shallow dive, its flukes raised, its pleated throat and long flippers modelled in fibreglass and painted a deep blue grey. Beneath it, on the floor of the lower level, visitors lie on their backs to look up at its belly. The model is life size, made to the measurements of a female whale that was found in the South Atlantic in 1925, and it remains one of the most photographed objects in New York.
The whale is a piece of sculpture as much as a scientific model. Look at the asymmetric colouring, the faint mottling on the flanks, the small dorsal fin set far back, and the navel, a detail added during the 2003 renovation when the model was repainted and given a more accurate shape. The eye, small for such a body, sits just above the corner of the mouth. Below and around the whale, the hall's dioramas show a coral reef, a kelp forest, a sperm whale battling a giant squid in the dark, and an Antarctic scene of penguins and seals. The blue lighting and the sounds of the sea are meant to make you feel submerged.
The hall opened in 1969 and was renovated in 2003 with new lighting, video screens and the corrected whale. Blue whales were hunted to the edge of extinction in the twentieth century and are slowly recovering under international protection. The model serves as a reminder of what the ocean holds and what nearly vanished from it.
Did You Know? The museum sometimes hosts sleepover nights for children, who spread their sleeping bags directly under the whale.
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