Art at Lincoln Center: The Public Art and List Print and Poster Collections

FOREWORD

As Lincoln Center celebrates its fiftieth anniversary on May 11, 2009, it is natural that the many accomplishments of the first, largest, and still most consequential performing arts institution of its kind in the world will be celebrated. How fitting it is that the impact on the visual arts of the twelve resident organizations of Lincoln Center and on its five million annual visitors should be recorded in this handsome volume. Charles Riley magnificently describes the circumstances in which dozens upon dozens of renowned artists offered their sculpture, painting, prints, and posters to celebrate an art form, to adorn a building, to mark a special festival or occasion, or to capture the beauty and elegance of a public space.

These works cause us to reflect on what has transpired in the five decades since President Dwight D. Eisenhower placed a shovel in the ground of a slum area on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Little could Lincoln Center’s founders have known of the success of the experiment to which they had given birth.

From its inception, Lincoln Center was an idea that not only captured the imagination of dancers and musicians, choreographers and composers, stage and lighting designers, actors and directors, and filmmakers and educators, it also attracted some of the best known visual artists to its side, complementing the beauty that appears on our stages with inspired work that adorns the walls of our theaters and public spaces and that hangs in the homes, offices, and dormitories of tens of thousands of patrons.

Merely to note some names is to suggest both the high standard and the dazzling variety of the visual artists whose work graces Lincoln Center:

Henry Moore

Marc Chagall

Jasper Johns

Lee Bontecou

Alexander Calder

David Smith

Helen Frankenthaler

Robert Rauschenberg

Andy Warhol

Jacob Lawrence

Roy Lichtenstein

Auguste Rodin

To all whose work is depicted on these pages we owe our gratitude, as we do to Vera and Albert List and Peggy and David Rockefeller, conspicuous among the benefactors who made it possible to proclaim that at Lincoln Center all forms of human expression are welcome and celebrated.

May we be as fortunate in the next fifty years to enjoy the respect and admiration of artists of a caliber that make Lincoln Center the unique and extraordinary place honored in this volume.

Reynold Levy, President

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc.

INTRODUCTION

Every year, almost five million lovers of the arts see the rich collection of paintings, sculpture, and prints that a farsighted team of experts specially commissioned or collected from many of the world’s greatest artists. As audience members excitedly make their way to more than five thousand performances annually of opera, ballet, concerts, and plays at one of the world’s great palaces of culture, many have no idea that these treasures, which can seem peripheral, surround them. This book is an opportunity to look, savor, and take a backstage peek into the history of an art project that took shape in the 1960s yet anticipated many of the most significant developments in the art of our time.

To frame this story, it is important to remember the state of the art world at the time when the Lincoln Center collection was formed and the List Art Program was conceived. The architects, collectors, benefactors, and advisers who made contemporary art a presence at Lincoln Center were pioneers. This was well before the record-setting auction market of our time, and two decades prior to the first auction boom of the 1980s, when Christie’s and Sotheby’s were featured not just in art magazines but on evening television as well as in the business press. Today, the mechanism of the art market lies open to the eager inspection of investors and celebrities as well as the onlookers who delight in the spectacle of seeing vast sums spent on a Picasso or a Van Gogh. Back in the 1960s, when the first act of our drama unfolded, the contemporary art world was a decidedly smaller circle. Many of the insiders were, thankfully, decision makers involved in building Lincoln Center. They included Vera List, who founded an innovative print program to benefit the organization, the Rockefellers, the architect Philip Johnson and his collaborators, the Museum of Modern Art’s director, Alfred Barr, and the other distinguished members of the Art and Acquisitions Committee who were charged with acquiring the art that would complement the spectacular architectural achievement and performances to come. The circle within which these experts operated was a tight one, including just a few first-tier dealers (such as Leo Castelli, Klaus Peris, Charles Egan, Betty Parsons, and Sidney Janis, some of whom play ancillary roles in the pages to follow) showing a relatively concentrated avant-garde of artists, many of whose careers were advanced when they caught the spotlight of Lincoln Center commissions. Some were Pop stars such as Robert Indiana and Andy Warhol; others were Color Field painters, including Helen Frankenthaler, or second-generation Abstract Expressionists, notably David Smith. When Lincoln Center acquired their work, few outside the downtown art scene had ever heard of Jasper Johns, much less Lee Bontecou. Even in the case of such acknowledged masters as Marc Chagall, Henry Moore, and Alexander Calder, the Lincoln Center commissions represent particularly revealing chapters in their biographies. One of the most exciting aspects of recounting the history of the collection stems from appreciating the remarkable prescience of the Art and Acquisitions Committee, as well as Vera List, in finding the future masters of Modern art history.

In addition to the sculpture and paintings that became integral parts of the campus, all along the glittering lobbies, hallways, and lower-level galleries is an extraordinary collection of prints and posters that bears the signatures of many of the great masters of our time, from Josef Albers to Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, Robert Motherwell, Gerhard Richter, and more than a hundred others. These colorful, masterful images are collected in a catalogue raisonné in this book celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Lincoln Center, an innovative collaboration between the visual and performing arts that has an international reputation in the worldwide graphics community. They are the gems of an ambitious print project inaugurated in 1962 with a gift from Albert and Vera List, connoisseurs of European graphics, who saw an opportunity to support their favorite concert venue and elevate its visual standards at the same time. From the first poster by Ben Shahn (created to commemorate the opening of Philharmonic Hall by the New York Philharmonic) to the cutting-edge prints of today, the Lincoln Center/List Art Poster and Print Program has ensured that the Modernist course continues. That first poster was the initial step along a path that would connect hundreds of artists, master printmakers, collectors, leading figures in the arts, and untold thousands of passersby who glimpse, enjoy, and move on to the theater or subway, an ensemble that has grown over time, however unobtrusively, from the first issue.

The dynamic leadership of Lincoln Center’s chairman, Frank Bennack, and president, Reynold Levy, fosters the role of the visual arts on campus. Two key figures have been the concertmasters, in turn, for this ensemble, which at its core is a fine example of chamber music in arts management. Delmar Hendricks guided the program for its first decades and was succeeded by Thomas Lollar. Together with Frank Stanton, they compose the trio that collaboratively made most of the day-to-day art decisions at Lincoln Center over the years after the original members of the committee had finished selecting the collection. All three happen to be discerning collectors of contemporary art who are also top-flight business minds, with the sort of marketing acumen and managerial skill that bring private-sector efficacy to a public-sector organization. Corporate culture has a word for this type of confluence: synergy. While Stanton was an expert in print media and television, and Hendricks was a man of the performing arts world, Lollar is the ultimate art insider, acutely cognizant of his role in ensuring that the freshest currents in art are part of the mix at Lincoln Center.

The Lincoln Center/List Art Poster and Print Program continues the legacy. As each new season attracts the world’s most celebrated stars of the performing arts, their counterparts from the visual arts contribute their own virtuosic performances on commission from the program. The portfolio has grown to include many of the most illustrious contemporary prints in the connoisseur’s catalogue. Art at Lincoln Center takes us into the process that created the prints, opening doors to the artists’ and master printmakers’ studios to make the works more accessible. For the growing community of print specialists, this volume provides an indispensable reference guide to an important source of contemporary works, as well as a primer on some of their technical features.

For those interested in the economics of nonprofits and the ways in which the arts can be supported, the Lincoln Center/List Art Poster and Print Program offers a case study in forward-looking cultural policy and planning. It is remarkable, in retrospect, to consider how far ahead of its time the project turned out to be. Recent studies of the arts in the world economy have shown that in the 1960s the arts in the United States, where the model for supporting dance, classical music, opera, and serious theater was typically a combination of some government funding and substantial direct donations from a handful of civic-minded angels, were already far more dependent on private patronage than in Europe. There, the major cultural institutions simply relied on government subsidies so generous that many Americans in the performing arts found their living abroad. European arts institutions, at least until the 1990s, could assume that public funds would cover the budget shortfalls. What Vera List and others at Lincoln Center realized was that the arts could, and perhaps should, sustain themselves and one another, and the success of her program has substantiated that idea.

The Lincoln Center/List Art Poster and Print Program also presented a way to reinvigorate the Lincoln Center art collection. As each new print was issued and took its place on the wall, it altered the collection at least incrementally. With the recent revival of the Art and Acquisitions Committee, under the leadership of its new head, Donald Marron, the permanent collection is also showing new signs of life. Vera List long ago expressed her concern that by leaving many of the major paintings and sculptures in the same place on the campus for an extended period of time—decades in most cases—Lincoln Center was consigning them to a kind of neglect as people became too used to seeing them in the same setting. What is familiarly known is not known at all, just because it has become so familiar, the philosopher G. W. F. Hegel once observed. Vera List’s idea was remarkably simple and effective: move them around. I know at home, when I just move one piece, it just seems to electrify and refresh everything else that one looks at, and you become more aware of it, she observed in an interview for the Lincoln Center oral history. The dynamic signs of change are already part of the campus. In the summer of 2006, in collaboration with the Public Art Fund, an exuberant outdoor sculpture by the hot contemporary artist Nancy Rubins was installed, to fanfare, in the plaza between the fountain and Columbus Avenue. A giant concoction of rowboats, skiffs, canoes, kayaks, the shells of jet skis and other small, colorful marine vehicles loomed over the heads of pedestrians who could, if brave enough, stroll right under it. In the same year, the Arnold and Marie Schwartz Gallery Met, a new art gallery in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House, opened to rave reviews, featuring works by John Currin, Richard Prince, Cecily Brown, and George Condo, During the next summer, David Michalek’s Slow Dancing featured a video installation projected on towering screens hung from the facade of the New York State Theater and filled with high-definition video portraits of dancers, including Trisha Brown, Bill T. Jones, William Forsythe, Shen Wei, Wendy Whelan. Judith Jamison, and others. In 2008, the Met began asking artists to create works to hang on the front of the opera house. The first artists to take part included Barnaby Furnas, Francesco Clemente, and George Condo, whose banners announced new Met productions. Inside the house, the fire screen that the audience views upon entering the theater (a metal curtain fifty-four feet high and fifty-four feet wide) has become the canvas for a contemporary artist. The project was inaugurated by Jeff Koons on opening night and has remained on view through the 2008–2009 season.

Many arts institutions are keen to have their annals published, and these histories are often, although valuable for posterity, rather dry reading. Fortunately for us, the inside story of art at Lincoln Center unfolds like a suspense tale as the fearless proponents of Modernism take on conservative politicians and wary critics in deliberations that are filled with provocative issues and inspiring discoveries. Even as this book covers the timeline thoroughly, it also prompts an array of challenging questions about fine art and its relation to the public as well as to architecture, commerce, and philanthropy. The decisions that led to the way the Lincoln Center art collection was amassed, for instance, present an archetypal episode in the history of Modernism in both art and architecture, as the advocates of abstraction battle the adherents of representation while both sides tacitly adhere to the principles of Classicism. Any student of the evolution of Modernism as a style as well as a movement will learn a memorable lesson from the eyewitness accounts of the building of Lincoln Center and the installation of its art.

ONE

A PRIVATE ART TOUR OF LINCOLN CENTER

Welcome to one of the great secrets of the art world: the collection of Modern masterworks at Lincoln Center. Most Lincoln Center patrons are probably so used to dashing by these sculptures and paintings on the way to an eight o’clock curtain that they are barely aware of the gems around them. But now, with the luxury of time to linger and enjoy the background stories, we have the opportunity to get to know what riches surround the almost five million visitors who cross this grand plaza every year. Many arrive just in time to rendevous at the massive black circular fountain at the center of the plaza, where we begin our tour, before heading to one of the twenty-three theaters, or a class