At Theater, Quite an Art Gallery

This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

The New York Sun

Family outings to New York City Ballet’s “The Nutcracker” can be pure delight. But for those who feel they’ve heard the “Waltz of the Flowers” one too many times, the trip to Lincoln Center may seem like a holiday chore.

One way to recharge is to take a few minutes, on the way in and during intermission, to appreciate the New York State Theater’s collection of 20th-century art. The State Theater holds the most exciting art collection of any building at Lincoln Center. Many of the works, including art by Jasper Johns, Elie Nadelman, and Lee Bontecou, were commissioned by the building’s chief architect, Philip Johnson.

The architects and early directors of Lincoln Center wanted the visual arts to have a prominent place on the campus. In 1961, Albert and Vera List gave a $1 million gift, half of which was for the purchase of paintings and sculptures. At the same time, the directors of Lincoln Center established a Committee on Arts and Acquisitions, which included the directors of both the Museum of Modern Art and the Yale University Art Gallery. (The Committee still exists, but has been relatively quiet in recent years. This may change soon, though, as campus redevelopment offers opportunities to commission or purchase new works, the director of visual arts, Thomas Lollar, said.)

Not all of the artists represented in the State Theater’s collection went on to great fame and huge prices –– but some artists, like Ms. Bontecou and Mr. Johns, did. “Numbers,” for which Mr. Johns was reportedly paid $12,000, is today worth more than 1,000 times that. In 1999, having received offers of as much as $15 million for the painting, the Lincoln Center board announced it would consider selling it. But this prompted an enormous public outcry, and the board quickly changed its mind. Today, there is a common understanding that these works are as much a part of the State Theater, and of New York’s history and landscape, as Johnson’s design. “It’s part of our cultural heritage,” Mr. Lollar said.

Mr. Johns’s “Numbers” hangs in the lobby, just to the east of the entrance, and is the most famous work in the theater. A grid of stenciled numbers, executed in Sculptmetal –– a liquid that can be spread like paint before it hardens –– the work is the largest of Mr. Johns’s “Numbers” series and his only public commission. In a homage to the performing arts, Mr. Johns based the dimensions of the squares on the length of the choreographer Merce Cunningham’s foot, and there is one of Mr. Cunningham’s footprints in the upper right of the painting.

Going the other direction from the entrance, you’ll find another of Johnson’s commissions, Ms. Bontecou’s untitled relief sculpture. It has the rough, primal quality of all of Ms. Bontecou’s early works, with its surfaces torn from found objects, like an old fire hose and the Plexiglass turret of a World War II bomber, and its three dark, gaping holes.

In the 1960s and early 1970s, Ms. Bontecou showed at the Leo Castelli Gallery with many of the other big artists of the period, including Mr. Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, and Frank Stella. Later, she chose to leave Castelli, and New York, and live quietly for several decades in rural Pennsylvania. But in the last few years she has had a major resurgence, beginning with a retrospective at MoMA in 2004. Mr. Lollar said that until recently Lincoln Center didn’t even know how much to insure the sculpture for. Today its worth is estimated at around $2 million. Museums and galleries ask to borrow it, Mr. Lollar said, but Lincoln Center hasn’t lent it out, because it would leave such a hole in the theater.

As curtain time approaches, you’ll proceed up the staircases on either side, passing one of the two large gilt reliefs by Yasuhide Kobashi, “Ancient Song” and “Ancient Dance.” Kobashi was a protégé of Kirstein’s. Kirstein met him in Japan in 1958, when he was on tour with the ballet, a former company manager, Eddie Bigelow, recalled. Kobashi was the son of a famous Japanese potter and was himself a potter and sculptor. Kirstein brought Kobashi back to New York and hired him to design sets, as well as encouraging his development as sculptor. “It was characteristic of [Kirstein’s] career and his life that he was always helping other artists,” Mr. Bigelow said. Kirstein commissioned “Ancient Song” and “Ancient Dance” in 1972, for City Ballet’s Stravinsky Festival.

Upstairs, the Grand Promenade is dominated by another monumental pair, Nadelman’s “Circus Woman” and “Two Female Nudes.” These giant, pneumatic women float like Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade balloons in the imposing, largely rectilinear space of the promenade. Johnson had this contrast in mind when he commissioned them, based on two smaller figures executed by Nadelman in the 1940s. Johnson had them copied in white marble, from the same Italian quarry used by Michelangelo.

During intermission, while the crew are sweeping the snow off the stage, try to see some of the works hung in less prominent hallways off the first-tier lobby, whose artists generally need to be identified by both first and last names. Johnson commissioned Jacques Lipschitz’s “Birth of the Muses” for one of John D. Rockefeller’s guesthouses; Mrs. Rockefeller later gave it, and Francesco Somaini’s abstract “Large Bleeding Martyr,” to Lincoln Center. Johnson arranged the purchase of Reuben Nakian’s rough, abstract “Voyage to Crete” and Edward Higgins’s coolly symmetrical “Sculpture” from the List fund. (Higgins intended the sculpture to resemble two people lying on their backs, heads together. Can you see it?)

Both Johnson and Lincoln Kirstein, a founder of City Ballet, were knowledgeable and passionate about art. In 1928, as a student at Harvard, Kirstein participated in founding the Harvard Society for Contemporary Art, an exhibition space that was a precursor to the Museum of Modern Art. Johnson himself had a major collection of mid-20th-century New York artists, and his interest in this school left its mark in the State Theater’s collection.


The New York Sun

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