On May 24 the Whitney Museum of American Art will break ground at the site of its future home in the meatpacking district. And in anticipation of its move there in 2015, the museum has cooked up a series of six back-to-back permanent-collection shows at its present location. The first of them, “Breaking Ground: The Whitney’s Founding Collection,” is up and running, and what a curious thing it is.

The exhibitions are conceived as a selective stock-taking of the institution’s holdings, and as a way to think out loud about how they will be presented in the new, larger Renzo Piano building. A decade or so ago the Museum of Modern Art designed a similar set of experiments as a prelude to its change of quarters.

The MoMA shows were more sweeping and complicated than the Whitney’s promise to be. But then the two museums, which opened just a few years apart some 80 ago, are fundamentally different. And as “Breaking Ground” makes clear, one big contrast lies in how they envision modernism.

For many of the American artists who, between 1900 and 1935, produced the 100 or so paintings and sculptures in the Whitney show, Matisse and Duchamp never existed, the 1913 Armory Show never happened, and North America was a nativist monoculture sealed off from the rest of the globe.

Apartness was built into the Whitney’s creation.

In the first decade of the 20th century Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, a New York heiress and sculptor, noted that her sophisticated friends made a fuss over new art from Europe but ignored new American art. As an American artist she had a problem with that and decided to try to alter the balance of attention.