I was on my way to somewhere else in Manhattan a few weeks ago, and my route had me walking through Rockefeller Center, which is not unusual for me. But it also put me in a corner of its underground concourse with an extensive exhibit of the history of the Center’s art (I’ll get back to that in another blog), and that had me looking up and looking out as I walked.
Looking Up, as it happens, is Rockefeller Center’s newest artwork. It’s by Tom Friedman, and was installed this year in a perfect location, staring at 30 Rock
And I realized what should always have been obvious: Rockefeller Center is arguably the city’s largest outdoor sculpture garden, and the one best stocked with the work of well-regarded 20th-century artists.
When Rockefeller Center was built in the 1930s, partly as an anti-Depression project (but of course with Rockefeller profit in mind), a serious budget was included for art as a way of unifying the multiple buildings visually and establishing a ‘high-end’ identity that would draw high-end tenants.
Paul Manship’s Prometheus is probably the most famous Rock Center piece. Youth and Maiden were made to go with it, but Manship decided they looked wrong there, and were moved elsewhere in the Center.
The plan for art went through several proposed themes before settling on “The March of Civilization.” Hartley Alexander, a professor of mythology and symbology (did you know they have those?) first came up with “Man the Builder,” but there was pushback, and he changed to “New Frontiers” that were supposed to represent humanity’s challenges “after the conquest of the physical world.” Ring the gong again, fire the professor, get a new theme.
But if some of the art that resulted from the project seems not to fit the “March of Civilization,” it’s because some of it was already commissioned before the Rockefellers and the architects and the artists agreed on the new theme.
Of course, that wasn’t the only art controversy at Rockefeller Center. One of the statues, a nude woman with a bird, titled “Girl with Goose” (go figure) was deemed a little too naked and not enough nude and was banished to a roof garden.
Over the entrance of 30 Rockefeller Plaza, originally the RCA Building and home of NBC. The centerpiece is flanked by the two pieces below.
The most famous art fight, though, was over a work that no one can see because it was destroyed before it was finished. John D. Rockefeller’s wife, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, admired the Mexican muralist Diego Rivera, to paint a large-scale mural, “Man at the Crossroads” in the lobby of 30 Rockefeller Plaza. When Rivera refused to paint over an image of Lenin, Nelson Rockefeller had the mural ripped from the wall, replastered and hired another artist. Movie fans will recognize the events from Cradle Will Rock.
Some of the sculpture work that’s not out on the plazas and building facades is not accessible just now, but what can be is fascinating: a blend of modern styles, especially art deco, with classic subjects and themes; pieces that represent the building’s original tenants, such as news and communication themes for NBC and the Associated Press; and pieces highlighting the countries of the ‘international plaza’ on the Fifth Avenue side.
British and French symbols face Fifth Avenue on the buildings either side of the Channel Gardens
The four smaller international buildings were originally meant to be occupied by retail and other tenants from France, Britain, Italy and Germany (Germany was dropped in 1934 as the Nazis took power), and each was given decor calling up images of the country. Much of Italy’s was eventually removed during World War II, but La Maison Francais and the British Empire Building flank a formal garden leading to the ice rink; it came to be called the Channel Gardens.
And, at the International Building, this work, The Story of Mankind, by Lee Lawrie, provided this week’s One-Clue Mystery, which was solved by ProfessorAbe and George G.
And this is a ringer: those figures are not part of Rockefeller Center’s sculpture collection. They are inhabitants of a Lego Rockefeller Center in the Lego Store in Rockefeller Center.
