To mark its 75th anniversary, the Whitney Museum of American Art honored the granddaughter of the founder of the museum, Flora Miller Biddle, who served as the museum’s president from 1977 to 1995.

More than 450 guests attended the event Tuesday, which featured an installation by Richard Tuttle designed for the occasion, and which raised $2.5 million for the museum. That impressive figure was a record, and made possible in part by a corporate sponsor, NetJets, whose private jets take many collectors on their art-buying sprees.

In her remarks, Ms. Biddle paid homage to her grandmother, the sculptor and collector Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, by turning to her own words:

“My chief desire is that you should share with me the joy which I have received from these works of art,” Whitney had said at the opening of the museum, just as the Great Depression was starting. “It is especially in times like these that we need to look to the spiritual. In art we find it.”

Ms. Biddle also acknowledged the people who made the Whitney what it is today, from its eight directors to its “precious guards,” whom she described as “our first link to the public, ever since the first one, when there was only one: Mr. Sylone Brown of blessed memory.”

She noted happily the year 1961, when non-family trustees first joined the board. “That change was good,” Ms. Biddle said. “Since then, this museum has never stopped growing.”

Today’s board members – among them Brooke Neidich, Robert Hurst, and Beth Rudin DeWoody – are passionately committed to growing the museum and supporting living artists.

They also know how to have fun at their galas, which bring out artists and celebrities and go on until the early morning, with the young collector’s group hosting an after-party that heats up just as the main event winds down.

The most memorable thrill was the first. As guests arrived, they mounted and walked across a catwalk to meet the event’s chairmen. With few guard rails on the contraption, and lots of stiletto heels, it was easy to imagine falling off. Luckily, no one did.

The fabulous dresses included big, formal gowns from Oscar de la Renta and Carolina Herrera, and, refreshingly, some more relaxed creations from up-and-comer Lyn Devon, who dressed Ms. Neidich and Jennifer Stockman.

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New Yorkers rush past grand public art every day, but they will want to stop and marvel at the restored Fountain of Life at the New York Botanical Garden.

The marble is polished, and the bronze figures depicting a frenzy of aquatic activity gleam in the light. The mermen, which have been missing for decades, have been re-created based on archival photographs of the artist Carl Tefft’s original work.

“I am bowled over,” a board member of the garden, Amy Goldman, said yesterday at the ribbon-cutting event. Ms. Goldman’s family trust supported the $1 million project, which was the dream of Ms. Goldman’s mother, Lillian Goldman, who loved all water features, even modest birdbaths.

This fountain is by no means modest.

“It’s really like the fountains of Rome, right here in New York City,” the president of Building Conversation Associates, Raymond Pepi, who oversaw the project, said.

The president of the New York Botanical Garden, Gregory Long, told the few hundred guests gathered the story the sculptures depict.

“It’s very beautiful and very complex,” Mr. Long said.

You’ll just have to see for yourself. And while you’re at it, take a swing through the new science gallery in the library, which is directly behind the fountain. It was made possible by support from board member Edward Bass.

agordon@nysun.com