“Completion by Contrast”: Architecture and Sculpture in Postwar New York
By Donald Albrecht and Thomas Mellins
In the March 30, 1963 issue of the New Yorker, art critic and historian Calvin Tomkins profiled sculptor Richard Lippold, whom he described as “by all odds, the busiest artist now working predominantly in collaboration with architects.”[1] Tomkins asserted that Lippold was the perfect choice for such endeavors, because his sculpture had “an almost impersonal, otherworldly character that seems ideally suited to the cool, impersonal spaces of contemporary architecture. At the same time, the gold, silver, brass, and other metals [he] employs…often have a richness and a warmth of tone that helps to relieve the chill of all of the glass and steel in modern buildings.”[2]
Framing Lippold’s output in a broader cultural context, Tomkins contended that some observers were describing the early 1960s as an architectural “renaissance,” because architects were commissioning painters and sculptors to create new site-specific works for their buildings, and, as a result, architecture, for the first time in several hundred years, “is once again taking on its ancient role as mother of the arts.”[3] While this bold assertion may strike most people today as far-fetched (many of the era’s buildings have not weathered well critically) it is undeniably true that architects were taking the cultural lead, commissioning sculptors in numerous high-profile projects. Elevating clients into patrons, this synthesis of art and architecture in both corporate and civic settings reflected America's international standing not only as an economic and military powerhouse, but also as a newly emergent cultural force on the world stage. This new status had its roots at the end of World War II, when, unscathed by the war’s devastation and unencumbered by centuries-old traditions, New York began to supplant Paris as the international capital of modernism.
Between the early 1950s and the mid-1970s, a synergy between modern architecture and sculpture was forcefully played out in collaborations initiated by architects Philip Johnson (1906-2005), Wallace Harrison (1895-1981), Max Abramovitz (1908-2004), and Gordon Bunshaft, (1909-1990) a partner in the firm Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. Among these architects, Johnson had the strongest professional connections to the city’s modern art scene. In the late 1920s, he helped found the Museum of Modern Art. As its first curator of the department of architecture and design, he and architectural historian Henry-Russell Hitchcock co-organized the pioneering 1932 exhibition, “Modern Architecture: International Exhibition,” which set the template for postwar steel-and-glass International Style modernism, an aesthetic Johnson avidly embraced when he became a practicing architect in the mid-1940s.
Johnson took a leading role in the fusion of modern art and architecture, providing not only key commissions, but also a polemical foundation for this trend. In March of 1951, for example, he organized a symposium at the Museum of Modern Art titled “The Relationship of Painting and Sculpture to Architecture.” Inspired by his belief that architecture was essentially a formalist art as delineated in the 1932 exhibition, Johnson argued that highly individualistic modern art, which also maintained its integrity as a salable object within a burgeoning art market, was most effectively presented as a contrast to the building, not aesthetically integrated within the architect’s design. The architecture critic Ada Louise Huxtable agreed with Johnson’s approach, stating in 1959, “The arts today—independent, autonomous, un-integrated—are prepared to serve and complement each other in a very special way. The basis of the relation is apposition not integration. Architecturally, it means enrichment by juxtaposition, completion by contrast.”[4]
Putting his symposium theories into practice, Johnson hired Ibram Lassaw (1913-2003) to be a part of the creative team responsible for the Congregation Kneses Tifereth synagogue (1953) in Port Chester, New York, that he was designing. Lassaw had emigrated to New York as a child and while still a teenager, became mesmerized by the paintings and sculptures of Sophie Taeuber-Arp, Wassily Kandinsky, and Jacques Villon. Lassaw’s work for Johnson marked a significant post-World War II trend, in which Jewish congregations increasingly chose modernism as an expression of their integration into American society. Adopting modern architecture, according to Jewish émigré architect Erich Mendelsohn, made Jews “full participants in this momentous period of America’s history.”[5]
Lassaw’s sculptures for the synagogue contrasted with Johnson’s design, which broadened the architect’s stylistic approach beyond a strict interpretation of the International Style to include more classicizing tendencies, most notably the synagogue’s domed, oval-shaped entrance pavilion and billowing ceiling canopy. Lassaw’s contribution comprised an abstract metal wall sculpture framing the ark, as well as a freestanding menorah on the bima; both elements were executed in an Abstract Expressionist idiom, the first American style to attract international attention and a key factor in New York’s ascension to the status of global art capital. Lassaw was one of many Abstract Expressionist sculptors, including Herbert Ferber (1906-1991), David Hare (1917-1992), and Theodore Roszak (1907-1981), who intersected with architects and who paralleled Abstract Expressionist painters. “Just as the painters used the direct process of painting to encounter new motifs,” critic and historian Irving Sandler has noted, “so the sculptors used the direct process of welding. The welding medium enabled them to improvise relatively freely with structure and with the molten crust that activated the unconscious imagination and suggested biomorphic images."[6]
Lee Bontecou's 1964, within the stair hall of Philip Johnson's New York State Theater (now the David H.Koch Theater), Lincoln Center, 1964. ©Ezra Stoller/ESTO
Johnson continued his exploration of classical composition as well as his practice of commissioning artists when, in the early 1960s, he hired Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) to create a sculpture for his New York State Theater, now known as the David H. Koch Theater (Johnson’s building, completed in 1964, integrated an extensive art program, in which Jasper Johns and Elie Nadelman, among others, participated.) Bontecou was best known for her wall sculptures with ominous, funnel-like black voids that carried overtones of violence and war’s horrors.
She had been given her first solo exhibition at the Leo Castelli gallery in 1960, which was followed by another solo show at the Betty Parsons gallery the next year. New York museums soon acquired her work and she was featured in the Museum of Modern Art’s important “The Art of Assemblage” exhibition in 1961 and in “Americans 1963.” All of this attention prompted Johnson to commission her to create a work for the staircase leading from the theater’s entrance lobby to its Grand Promenade. “Word that Miss Bontecou had been commissioned for one of her highly individual constructions,” noted New York Times art critic John Canaday, “gave a shaky feeling that in a theater devoted to ballet and operetta her contribution might look like a bit of exposed plumbing. But … she has risen above every connotative hazard to produce a vigorous and superbly balanced design perfectly adapted to the allotted space.”[7] Johnson went a step further in his praise of the sculpture, titled 1964, the course textures of which contrasted with the surrounding travertine elegance: “The stair hall is a better stair hall for her efforts. If she wanted she could become the ‘decorator’ for all of us poverty-stricken architects.”[8]
Isamu Noguchi's Red Cube, in front of Gordon Bunshaft's Marine Midland Building, 140 Broadway, 1967. ©Ezra Stoller/ESTO
Although not a museum professional-turned-architect like Philip Johnson, Gordon Bunshaft was equally committed to the marriage of art and architecture. Joining the New York office of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill in 1937, where he stood out as one of its most talented architects for some four decades, Bunshaft designed many of the era’s signature mid-century modern structures in New York and its suburbs. On these projects he worked closely with sculptors, most notably Isamu Noguchi and Alexander Calder. Around 1950 Bunshaft commissioned Noguchi (1904-1988), who had already worked in an architectural setting, creating a relief sculpture, News (1938), for the Associated Press Building at Rockefeller Center, as well as on the stage with choreographer Martha Graham, to design totem-like sculptures for the plaza at Lever House (1952), the pioneering International Style office tower on Park Avenue. Though never built, the commission led to a long and productive professional relationship, including collaborations at SOM’s Connecticut General Life Insurance Company Headquarters in Bloomfield, Connecticut (1957), Chase Manhattan Bank (1960) and Marine Midland Bank (1967) in New York City’s financial district, and Yale University’s Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library (1963). Surprisingly, given Noguchi’s extensive work with architects, he feared that the architect’s dominant role would result in sculpture that “smacks of the academic past, and turns out as decoration.”[9] To avoid this problem, Noguchi, whose abstract forms were derived from both nature and pure geometry, sometimes took a broadly environmental approach, creating, in effect, sculptural landscapes. His sunken plazas adjacent to the Beinecke Library and Chase Manhattan Bank skillfully mediated between art and architecture.
Bunshaft and SOM had a decades-long collaboration with Alexander Calder (1898-1976). Celebrated for his “mobiles,” motor- or air-powered kinetic sculptures, and static and monumentally scaled "stabiles,” Calder developed both forms in his work with SOM, specifically the mobiles Untitled for the lobby of the Chase Manhattan Bank and .125 at their International Arrivals Building at Idlewild (now JFK) Airport (1957), as well as the black-metal stabile, Le Guichet (The Ticket Window), on the plaza in front of the New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at Lincoln Center (1963).
After World War II, Mary Callery (1903-1977), who during the 1930s had lived in Paris, where she befriended Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Fernand Léger, became, in effect, Harrison & Abramovitz’s in-house sculptor. Employing her signature style, which combined sleek abstract forms with representational imagery, Callery created four works for the architects: Three Birds in Flight, an avian ensemble suspended in the lobby of the Alcoa Building (now Regional Enterprise Tower) in Pittsburgh (1953); Fables of La Fontane, a fence-like structure inspired by figures from children’s fables that was originally meant to be climbed on, for the PS 34 Franklin D. Roosevelt school on Manhattan’s Lower East Side (1954); and Moon and Stars, a grouping of gilded bronze sculptures hung in the lobby of the Exxon Building (1971), one of the firm’s so-called XYZ Buildings across Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue from Rockefeller Center. Harrison & Abramovitz also worked with Ibram Lassaw, who created a wall sculpture for the pedestrian passageway flanking the Celanese Building (1973), the last to be completed of the firm’s Sixth Avenue ensemble. The pleasures of wandering through this museum-without-walls were praised by Sasha Cavander, writing in The New York Times, who recommended “no better offbeat and free sightseeing trip.”[10]
As it did for Philip Johnson and Gordon Bunshaft, Lincoln Center provided both Harrison and Abramovitz with opportunities to work with sculptors. This was fitting given that the performing art center’s founders, including John D. Rockefeller III, had seen the center’s role as celebrating a synergy between performance, architecture, and fine art, and cementing the nation’s cultural leadership during the Cold War. Harrison, who designed the Metropolitan Opera House (1966) commissioned Callery to design what became her best-known work: a sculpture that decorates the top of the theater’s proscenium arch. A guidebook written at the time of the opera house’s completion described the work as an “untitled ensemble of bronze forms creating a bouquet of sculptured arabesques.”[11] Other commentators were not so kind. Lacerated as “another sculptural nullity” by Hilton Kramer in The New York Times, the sculpture has been dubbed “The Car Wreck” and “Spaghetti Spoon in Congress with Plumbers Strap” by Met staff.[12]
Richard Lippold's Orpheus and Apollo, in the lobby of Max Abramovitz's Philharmonic Hall (now David Geffen Hall), Lincoln Center, 1963. ©Ezra Stoller/ESTO
More productive was Abramovitz’s experience with Richard Lippold (1915-2002) four years earlier. A graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Lippold had initially studied industrial design and in 1937 established a design studio in his hometown of Milwaukee. Lippold would soon concentrate on sculpture, however, later serving as an artist in residence at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and a longtime faculty member of Hunter College in New York. Before working at Lincoln Center, Lippold had designed an untitled hanging construction over the bar at the Grill Room of the Four Seasons restaurant, located on the ground floor of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson’s Seagram Building (1958) and Homage to Our Age in the reception hall of the New York office of the advertising agency J. Walter Thompson (1961).
For Lincoln Center’s Philharmonic Hall, Lippold’s five-ton work made of a copper-and-zinc alloy, Orpheus and Apollo comprised 190 rectilinear sheets aggregated into two clusters and suspended on two steel cables.[13] Abramovitz had originally considered decorating the lobby with traditional crystal chandeliers manufactured by the well-known Viennese firm of J. & L. Lobmeyer, but ultimately decided that Lippold’s work would more fully fulfill his intention to have something “light and airy and graceful.” [14] Lippold was simultaneously at work on sculptures for the Pan Am Building, commissioned by Walter Gropius, one of the building’s architects.
The success of collaborations between architects and artists could be seen as rooted in two factors, one having to do with formal considerations and the other related to the artistic process. A shared interest in the experience of space as it unfolds in time allowed both architects and sculptors to see their work as harmonious, not merely an instance of art playing a secondary role. At the same time, at least in some cases, the potential battle of egos seemed negotiable. Speaking for architects, Johnson had noted the hazards, stating: “Commissioning decorative works of art for monumental buildings is dangerous in any age. In ours it is well nigh impossible. Artists are interested in their own expression, not in helping mine. I in turn am more interested in space modulation than in wall decoration.”[15] Yet, Johnson’s work with Lippold provides a positive case study. “I consider him the best sculptor in the world to work with,” Johnson wrote. “He is very clear about the architectural requirements of a space; in other words, he does not set out to build a monument to Richard Lippold.”[16] “As in a love affair,” Lippold responded, “when sacrificing one’s self to love opens new worlds of understanding of the human condition, so, I believe, the ascetic artist, by bending his forms to the master proportion and social creed expressed in a good building, can fulfill himself.”[17]
Donald Albrecht is an independent curator who has organized exhibitions for the Getty Center, Library of Congress, Museum of the City of New York, and the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, among others.
Thomas Mellins is an independent curator and architectural historian. In addition to organizing exhibitions at museums and libraries nationwide, he is the co-author of New York 1880, New York 1930 and New York 1960.
[1]Calvin Tomkins, “Profiles: A Thing among Things,” New Yorker 40 (March 30, 1963): 47
[2] Tomkins, “Profiles: A Thing among Things”: 47.
[3] Tomkins, “Profiles: A Thing among Things”: 47.
[4] Ada Louise Huxtable, “Art in Architecture,” Craft Horizons 19 (January/February 1959): 11, quoted in Cécile Whiting, “Philip Johnson: The Whence and Whither of Art in Architecture,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 75 (September 2016): 327.
[5] Erich Mendelsohn, “In the Spirit of Our Age,” Commentary 3 (June 1947): 542, quoted in Susan G. Solomon, Louis I. Kahn’s Jewish Architecture: Mikveh Israel and the Midcentury American Synagogue (Hanover and London: Brandeis University Press and University Press of New England, 2009), 15.
[6]Irving Sandler quoted on the website of the Driscoll Babcock Galleries, New York, http://www.driscollbabcock.com, (accessed June 15, 2021).
[7] Philip Johnson quoted in John Canaday, “Nadelman Sculpture Is a Deft Adjunct to Architecture,” New York Times (March 23, 1964).
[8] Philip Johnson, “Young Artists at the Fair and Lincoln Center, “ Art in America : 123.
[9] Isamu Noguchi, A Sculptor’s World (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 160, quoted in Matthew Kirsch, “Ten Architects” on the website of the Noguchi Museum, http// www.noguchi.org, (accessed June 15, 2021).
[10] Sasha Cavander, “Lobbying in Midtown Manhattan,” New York Times (November 11, 1973).
[11] Guidebook to Lincoln Center, quoted in “What’s Up There on the Met’s Proscenium Arch?,” https://3dwarehouse.sketchup.com (accessed June 15, 2021).
[12] Hilton Kramer, “Another Sculptural Nullity for New York’s Lincoln Center,” New York Times (July 31, 1966).
[13] Lincoln Center could not accommodate Lippold’s sculpture in its renovation of Geffen Hall, and it recently was announced that it will be relocated to La Guardia Airport’s Central Hall.
[14] Max Abramovitz quoted in Tomkins, “Profiles; A Thing among Things”: 48.
[15] Johnson, “Young Artists at the Fair and Lincoln Center”: 123.
[16] Johnson quoted in Tomkins, “Profiles; A Thing among Things”: 47-48
[17] Richard Lippold quoted in Tomkins, “Profiles; A Thing among Things”: 48