Oil on Canvas

Rockefeller Center, John D's temple to technology, towering above Saint Patrick's Cathedral.

Philanthropy Magazine
January 2011

Oil on Canvas
by James Panero

The Rockefeller family has long been one of the nations most generous patrons of high culture. Suzanne Loebl assesses its legacy.

When antitrust laws broke up the ice floe of wealth accumulated in Standard Oil in 1911, John D. Rockefeller Sr. became the richest man in the history of the modern world. His fortune was estimated to reach into the hundreds of billions in today’s dollars.

A devout Baptist, Senior believed in giving his fortune away as zealously as he earned it. Following John Wesley’s evangelical economics—“gain all you can, save all you can, and give all you can”—Senior used his vast wealth to support initiatives in education and medicine. He provided funds to turn the University of Chicago and Rockefeller University into world-class institutions. His philanthropy supported Baptist schools throughout the country, most notably in the rural South. His wife, Laura (“Cettie”) Spelman Rockefeller, had been an ardent abolitionist, and after gifts from Rockefeller she became the namesake of Spelman College, a college in Atlanta for black women.

Senior imbued in his descendants his own sense of philanthropic obligation. As the family’s wealth began to pass into the hands of his only son, John D. Rockefeller Jr. carried on the religious tenor of his father’s giving, while widening the mission to include America’s great temples of culture. In America’s Medicis: The Rockefellers and Their Astonishing Cultural Legacy, Suzanne Loebl takes up the story with Junior and follows the family’s cultural philanthropy through Junior’s last surviving son, David Rockefeller. The youngest of five prominent brothers—John D. 3rd, Nelson, Laurance, and Winthrop—David, now 95 years old, inherited his grandfather’s longevity and continues the mission of his parents into the 21st century. Readers will have to wait for the sequel to this book to read about the philanthropy of the fourth generation of Rockefellers, following the elevation of David Jr. to chairman of the board of the Rockefeller Foundation this past November.

With hundreds of books already published on the Rockefeller family, the story Loebl tells may not be new, but it is told well. Her work is a breezy guide for how the Rockefellers supported the arts and how, today, we continue to enjoy their cultural largess. She not only recounts their achievements; she also seems to rejoice in their artistic successes, like Junior’s Rockefeller Center, that pagan temple to technology, and shows regret for those initiatives that fell short of their potential, like Nelson’s Empire State Plaza in Albany.

Loebl locates Junior’s philanthropic beginnings in his religious maturation at Brown University, where he became a protégé of its president, Elisha Benjamin Andrews, a Baptist minister. There, he modernized his world outlook while retaining his sense of piety. Understanding the Rockefellers’ progressive Protestantism is key to unlocking the family’s philanthropy. Loebl could have even done more with it. No family has given so much while deliberately courting so little prestige. At Brown, Junior met his future wife, Abby Greene Aldrich, the daughter of Rhode Island’s senior Senator. (He also smoothed out his awkward social manner—no more lengthy audits of dinner checks or salvaged postage stamps.) Later on, his faith would continue to inspire his giving, even (perhaps, especially) when applied to secular cultural causes.

As Junior settled back in New York after graduation and joined the family business, he took up teaching the Young Men’s Bible Class at the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church, which later relocated to Park Avenue. Inspired by the great Protestant modernist Harry Emerson Fosdick—the brother of an influential trustee of the Rockefeller Foundation—Junior undertook the creation of a new ecumenical cathedral in Morningside Heights, eventually donating $32 million to the project.

Junior laid the cornerstone for Riverside Church in 1927. Designed in the Gothic style of Chartres, the cathedral could accommodate 2,100 worshippers. It was completed in just three years, despite a massive fire during its construction. Included in the building’s elaborate ornamental program are carved likenesses of Albert Einstein and Charles Darwin, signaling the church’s (and Junior’s) progressive stance in the controversy between fundamentalism and theological modernism. The 22-story clarion, with 74 bronze bells, which includes the largest turned bell in the world, is named for Junior’s mother. Fosdick served as its first senior minister, and the church continues to broadcast Fosdick’s left-liberal worldview—sometimes to absurdity. In 2000, Fidel Castro delivered a four-hour-long diatribe from the Riverside pulpit, just one example of how politics sometimes obscure the beauty of the church’s towering architecture.

In the decades to follow, Rockefeller money spread through an ever widening circle of cultural enterprises. The successful ones were extensions of Junior’s ecumenical spirit, even when they were secular projects. Freed from a literal interpretation of the Bible, his advancement of science, art, and technology could take on its own religious fervor. Of these institutions, perhaps no other has been more influential and more closely associated with the Rockefeller family than the development of the Museum of Modern Art, built on the grounds of the one-time family compound.

MOMA is the Rockefeller temple to modernity, with a reverential solemnity that continues to define the institution to this day. Loebl dedicates a large section of her story to MOMA’s development and its principal founding patron, Abby Aldrich Rockefeller. Her husband, Junior, found little to like in modern art; his artistic passions were directed to sculpture, architecture, and Old World craftsmanship. Yet Abby saw her interest in modern art in Junior’s terms. “To me art is one of the great resources of my life,” she said. “I believe that it not only enriches the spiritual life, but that it makes one more sane and sympathetic, more observant and understanding, regardless of whatever ages it springs from or whatever subject it represents.”

The intricate dynamics of Rockefeller family giving could be comical at times, but they also served as lessons in how disparate tastes can play off each other to encourage greater developments. According to Loebl, Junior’s “dislike for some of modern art’s emotionally unrestrained, expressionistic spirit was such that the couple agreed that the art she acquired should be kept out of his sight.” At first Abby paid for her modest purchases, which formed a collection of thousands of modernist prints now in the MOMA collection, with Aldrich family money. In 1927, Junior increased her allowance of $50,000 for charitable gifts with another $25,000 for the art of her choosing. Abby sent her husband a formal thank-you letter, and Junior doubled the art budget the next year. Despite his aversion to its holdings, Junior proved to be MOMA’s single largest contributor by the time of his wife’s death in 1948. In addition to an initial $1.25 million, he donated another $4 million in her memory in the early 1950s. His sons, Nelson and David, later took up leadership roles at MOMA, donating artwork and millions more.

While Abby was founding MOMA in midtown, Junior went uptown, to the northern tip of Manhattan, for his greatest museum creation. As he did with his Riverside Church, which overlooks the Hudson River, Junior secured one of the most picturesque natural locations in the city for his creation—66 lofty acres around historic Fort Tryon, on a ridge north of the George Washington Bridge. He also bought up 700 acres of land along the Palisades in New Jersey to protect the viewshed across the Hudson.

The initial idea for bringing the fragments of disused ecclesiastic buildings from Europe to the United States belonged to George Grey Barnard, an eccentric sculptor. He imported columns and arches from four different cloisters, most notably the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Michel-de-Cuxa, before France tightened its laws on cultural exports. For a time he reassembled them as a small private museum on Fort Washington Avenue, not far from Rockefeller’s park property, which Junior donated to the city. Through Junior’s negotiations, the Metropolitan Museum was able to purchase Barnard’s architectural collection in 1925. Then with James Rorimer, the curator of the Met’s new Department of Medieval Art, and Charles Collens, the architect of Riverside Church, Junior reassembled the Cloister holdings into a unified building on a site reserved in northern Fort Tryon Park. The new Cloisters became the Met’s repository of medieval art, as well as one of the country’s great, unique architectural achievements. It also houses what was one of Junior’s most beloved possessions: the set of South Netherlandish Unicorn tapestries from 1495–1505.

Beyond these gems, few aspects of America’s cultural life have been bereft of Rockefeller largess. Loebl follows the story through the development of the Asia Society, Colonial Williamsburg, archeology museums, folk art collections, and the art of non-Western cultures. These have, of course, been a mere portion of the Rockefeller family’s entire philanthropic reach.

In the generation following Junior, the narrative of the Rockefellers’ cultural achievements gets harder to follow. There is an ever widening cast of characters. One also senses that the family’s ability to pull off great new cultural complexes gradually diminishes. Lincoln Center, John D. 3rd’s vital performing arts complex in Manhattan’s Upper West Side that includes spaces for the Metropolitan Opera, City Opera, the New York Philharmonic, the Juilliard School, and the New York City Ballet, is, architecturally, a brittle stepchild of Junior’s Rockefeller Center. Nelson’s redevelopment of downtown Albany into a massive governmental boondoggle, undertaken when he was Governor of New York, resembles nothing less than a fascistic parade ground cutting through the capital city.

Today the Rockefeller Foundation continues to support hundreds of cultural projects, but the heart of Rockefeller-style philanthropic fervor may have moved on to other causes. Maybe cultural philanthropy was but a generational stopover on the way to addressing more progressive political issues, ranging from global health to international relations and environmentalism. Politics also has a way of intruding in the arts. The Rockefellers found that out the hard way, when the family infamously commissioned Diego Rivera to paint a mural for Rockefeller Center. “Man at the Crossroads” ended up a paean to communism, featuring Vladimir Lenin, which Junior decided to remove. Fortunately, there are converts once the missionaries move on. With many hands now supporting them, the Rockefellers’ great cultural initiatives, from Rockefeller Center to MOMA to Lincoln Center, continue to thrive and enrich the life of the arts.

Gallery chronicle (January 2011)

Andy Piedilato, The Antagonist, courtesy of the artist

THE NEW CRITERION
January 2011

Gallery chronicle
by James Panero

On “Andy Piedilato: New Paintings” at English Kills Art Gallery, Brooklyn; "Andrew Hurst" at Storefront, Brooklyn; “Marksmen and the Palimpsests” at Centotto, Brooklyn; “Sacred Presence/Painterly Process” at the Derfner Judaica Museum, The Bronx; and “Becoming Modern in America” at Minus Space, Brooklyn.

The artists of New York no longer bloom in a decayed downtown. Tenth Street and Greenwich Village, Soho, Tribeca, Union Square: the areas that once nurtured artists’ studios now contain the most expensive real estate in the country. It’s a development that owes as much to culture as to policy. Today’s beneficiaries of the financial services industry, the city’s enduring economic engine, harbor a fierce nostalgie de la boue. So wealth has migrated from the pre-war “classic sixes” of the Upper East Side to the lofts and brownstones downtown. And in their pursuit of the down and out, the rich have inadvertently chased the artists from their studios in the heart of town.

Perhaps we should be thankful for the shakeout. Art-world centers are often peripheries. Montmartre and Montparnasse, two modernist neighborhoods at the turn of the last century, were the bookends of Paris, north and south of the city center and connected in 1910 by the Nord-Sud metro line. Today’s New York follows the same model. Artists are again pushed to the outskirts. Rather than being disconnected extremities, the peripheral communities they establish become vital frontiers, each developing its own characteristics.

In addition to offering studio and living space, many of these neighborhoods boast new galleries. Often artist-run, these galleries are becoming as important as the blue chips of Manhattan. They are also far more welcoming. You don’t need a passport to get to them, even if the locations may sound exotic and the subway stations unknown. Since many of these galleries maintain weekend-only hours, a Sunday afternoon outer-borough gallery crawl is fast emerging as a tradition on par with the Thursday-evening openings in Chelsea.

Founded in 2007, the gallery English Kills is already the old timer of Bushwick—currently the most rewarding artist center in Brooklyn—with an A-list lineup of talent. The director Chris Harding has described the gallery as his antidote to working for a year at Mary Boone. Still the space exudes its own sense of ambition. The largest gallery in the neighborhood, English Kills often shows expansive art—fast, messy paintings and installations with jock swagger. The frat-house quality of the place (which can seem like a cave) is sometimes reinforced by the odd hipster loafing on the disposable beach chair outside. You might also spot a parade of initiates, beer in hand, regularly emerging through a curtain separating the exhibition space from the private rooms in the back. Yet fear not—this gallery still gets the Good Gallerygoing Seal of Approval; I’ve even changed my baby’s diaper in the back room.

Andy Piedilato, the artist now on view at English Kills, is one reason to pay attention to this gallery.[1] With canvases over nine-foot square, Piedilato has been refining his use of hatch marks to denote bathroom-tile surfaces undulating in space. With the grout lines first laid down in masking tape, Piedilato has been able to focus the rough expressive energy of his paint handling to create a mash-up of neo-expressionism and Op Art. In some paintings, like Hummingbird and Iceboat, the spectral iconography of sinking ships and surfacing submarines plays off the weight of the bricked-up surfaces. In others, such as the more abstract Nut Rolling Through Hills, Red Roll, The Antagonist, and Maze, Piedilato tells his stories almost exclusively through volume and pattern. In all of them, the tactile surfaces feel like the tiles of a cold shower in a strange dream. These paintings are wet and chilly in a way you can’t easily shake off.

Storefront may be a gallery just around the corner from English Kills, yet the style of the two spaces could not be more different. I have covered Storefront, which Jason Andrew and Deborah Brown opened a year ago, on a few occasions in this space. I wish I could have written about every one of their three-week shows. Andrew and Brown have an interest in jewel-like work that plays off the small scale of their gallery as well as a local taste for the intimate and ad hoc. Austin Thomas’s solo show of bits of printed words and delicate paper collages of origami folds, which ran at Storefront in September and October, was the summa of this aesthetic.

The collage and assemblage artist Andrew Hurst is an English Kills regular, yet most recently his work went on display at Storefront.[2] Hurst is an expansive Bushwick artist who often creates performance pieces and writes his own poetry and music. The change in venue to tiny Storefront allowed us to observe his energy by focusing on his smaller work.

Is collage the creepiest of art forms? There might be a reason why criminals write their ransom notes from cut-up magazines. The repurposing of found objects and printed materials has an quasi-occult quality. Andrew Hurst follows in this tradition. Yet unlike his darker influences of Kurt Schwitters or Ray Johnson, Hurst practices only white magic. For him the power of collage and assemblage (which brings collage out to the third dimension) offers a compelling way to unlock materials. Hurst then reuses his found objects to depict a personal mythology. He starts with one or two pieces—often the lowliest castoffs pulled from the streets of Bushwick (a flattened shoe; the gears of a watch). By slowly adding more material, drawn through poetic associations—with paint and the textures of other found pieces thrown in the mix—he gives these cast-aways new life. Peel Sessions starts with a shredded tire and becomes a black hole filled with plastic gears and other personal ephemera. The work reminds me of the sculptures of Lee Bontecou, here turned into a meditation on speed and the mechanics of movement. Hurst also creates icons to his heroes—a gold-speckled championship panel to Muhammad Ali in The Greatest, and a diptych memorializing Max Ernst and Hurst’s pet tarantula in Homage to Max and Becky. Unlike many collage artists who revel in the superficial jokes of pop juxtapositions, Hurst goes for more profound impact, with detailed work that rewards close viewing.

Centotto is another nearby gallery that warrants a stopover. Paul D’Agostino is a young professor of Italian literature who has carved a project space out of the living room of his shared apartment. He mounts shows that feel like graduate seminars—with assigned readings and a conversation among classmates you only half understand. His immersive approach has its place. You pick up the ideas in the room even if you don’t catch every word. “Marksmen and the Palimpsests” was a two-artist exhibition on view last month that well reflected the Centotto style.[3] Here John Avelluto created his own three-hole notebook paper, with fabricated erasures and blue and red margin lines sometimes warping in odd directions. Josh Willis built up and scraped away scumbled paint to depict the Tower of Babel. Each played off the notions of unstable surfaces, where the end point looks like the start. The dialogue was brainy. Even if you didn’t get it, you felt elevated for having overheard the discussion.

Moving on to the Bronx, I recently traveled to a bucolic corner of Riverdale for an experiment in mixing contemporary art and Judaism. The show was by Jill Nathanson, and the venue was a stunning little museum overlooking the Hudson River Palisades that happens to be tucked in a retirement home.[4]

A recent exhibition at the Jewish Museum, featuring religious commissions by Robert Motherwell, Herbert Ferber, and Adolph Gottlieb, served as a good reminder that abstract art can be ideally suited for faiths that shun literal representation. Trained in American abstraction, Nathanson found new inspiration creating Jewish work several years ago by mixing Hebrew lettering into her swirling compositions. I remember once encountering a painting by Marsden Hartley that also incorporated Hebrew, and thinking that it appeared ideally American—full of that Old-Time Religion. Nathanson’s work likewise seems to be a natural extension of Abstract Expressionism, which of course never quite shook its mystical origins.

Following the lettering work, which she called “Seeing Sinai,” Nathanson took on the subject of Genesis for a series depicting the origin of the world. But just how do you depict nothing out of something? For this she did a close Torah reading with rabbis. In the “welter and waste” of her studio, Nathanson saw parallels in the act of creation. She made seven collages, each representing a day of creation, of colorful plastic sheets mixed in with the detritus of her artistic process.

Unfortunately, Nathanson sometimes overbuilds her compositions, resulting in a muddy mix. I was not a fan of the drippy plastics in the latest work, with welter and waste that looked more toxic than divine. Yet art sometimes succeeds in failure. Nathanson’s experiment in studio process and biblical scholarship is both an inspiration and a challenge for a new (old) direction in art.

Finally a word about the artist Loren Munk. Many gallery goers might know him through his pseudonym, James Kalm, and his online “James Kalm Report.” Since what must be the dawn of the internet age, Munk has been taking his interest in the contemporary art scene to the web by somewhat secretly filming and narrating gallery openings, large and small, with a digital camera strapped to his chest. A one-man Archives of American Art, Munk has created a singular cultural record by posting all of these videos free of charge on his website (lorenmunk.com) and on YouTube.

For anyone who obsesses over the history of art in New York, Munk is like that brilliant professor of anthropology who knows everything but sometimes forgets to take his meds. Under his given name, Munk paints heavily impastoed canvases of diagrams detailing the locations of artist studios and influences among the great schools and critics (Munk is a critic himself who writes for The Brooklyn Rail). Often these colorful charts riff on Alfred Barr’s old moma visuals of the history of modern art. Two of these panels are now on view in an exhibition at Minus Space, a gallery on the border of Carroll Gardens and the Gowanus Canal that I wrote about two months ago for its project show on Robert Swain.[5]

Munk’s work is meant to be absorbed as much for its swirling compositions and overall effect as for its didactic information. In their bright colors and levels of detail, the diagrams also seem to revere the artists and critics they depict. Next to them, MatthewDeleget of Minus Space has posted his collection of Life magazine’s historical coverage of modern art, including 1949’s “Jackson Pollock: Is he the greatest living painter in the United States?”

At the opening, there was a rush to see who would film the show à la James Kalm. Sharon Butler ended up making the video for her blog twocoatsofpaint.com. There could not have been a better tribute to Munk—a recognition that his work may just be art history in the making.

[1] “Andy Piedilato: New Paintings” opened at English Kills Art Gallery, Brooklyn, on December 4, 2010 and remains on view through January 9, 2011.

[2] “Andrew Hurst” was on view at Storefront, Brooklyn, from October 22 through November 14, 2010.

[3] “Marksmen and the Palimpsests” was on view at Centotto, Brooklyn, from November 5 through December 17, 2010.

[4]“Sacred Presence/Painterly Process” was on view at the Derfner Judaica Museum, The Bronx, from September 26 through December 31, 2010.

[5] “Becoming Modern in America” opened at Minus Space, Brooklyn, on December 11, 2010 and remains on view through January 29, 2011.

Goodbye hotels, hello homeless?

NEW YORK DAILY NEWS
December 26, 2010

Goodbye hotels, hello homeless?
by James Panero

Thanks to a new law against SRO hotels, the UWS is at risk

If you want to stay at the Alexander, a boutique hotel on 94th St. on the upper West Side, you better book your room soon. With plush bedding, sparkling renovated bathrooms and a welcoming staff, this hotel has received great reviews online. Problem is, the only guests who may stay here in the new year could be the homeless.

Because of a change in New York law, starting in 2011, single-resident-occupancy buildings (SROs) such as the Alexander will no longer be allowed to rent rooms for less than 30 days unless they get a new certificate of occupancy and, in most cases, a zoning exemption. So out goes this legitimate hotel, its hardworking employees, the happy tourists and a revenue engine for the city.

In comes Samaritan Village. On Dec. 10, this Queens-based substance abuse and mental-health center gave notice to the local community board that it intends to run a 200-bed homeless facility out of the Alexander, according to community sources and confirmed by a spokesman for Samaritan.

The conversion of a welcome local institution into a shelter for the city's indigent population may sound like deja vu all over again to longtime residents of the upper West Side like me. Unfortunately, it may be the beginning of a broader attack on urban sanity and gentrification throughout the city.

For decades, my neighborhood - like neighborhoods in Harlem, Chelsea and the East Village - has borne an unfair burden of New York's supportive housing industry. Despite the "fair share" law in the city Charter that requires social service facilities to be evenly distributed through all neighborhoods, W. 94th and 95th Sts. alone, next door to where I live, have seen half-a-dozen such institutions proposed in recent years, from homeless shelters to drug treatment centers to halfway houses. The residents of these two tree-lined streets - with their public schools, nursery schools and family residences - must wonder what they did to deserve such generosity.

State Sen. Liz Krueger has largely kept supportive housing out of the wealthiest portion of her district, the upper East Side, but she has championed legislation in Albany amending the multiple-dwelling law that could result in more than a dozen new supportive-house facilities opening in the old SROs on the upper West Side.

Krueger and her political allies - including Councilwoman Gail Brewer and State Assembly members Richard Gottfried and Linda Rosenthal - may believe they are protecting tenants' rights by preventing the proliferation of small hotels into SRO buildings. Instead, their beneficence has only managed to clear these buildings of useful small businesses, while protecting the special interests of the hotel workers' union, since the targeted SRO hotels generally employ nonunion labor.

The landlords will chase the dollars still available. Many vacated rooms can be expected to enter contracts with organizations operating with the Department of Homeless Services or other city agencies. The presence of these facilities and the undesirable groups they import, in turn, will push out industrious neighbors, rich and poor, or at least those who can afford to leave, along with local retail.

If Samaritan Village is allowed to open on the upper West Side, it will be the first of many such conversions here - a sad sign that the local political complex appears interested in anything but the rights of a community that has fought for decades to make its streets safer, better and more beautiful.

Other parts of the city should beware. By Krueger's own tally, once the new legislation goes into effect in 2011, it will impact 280 buildings citywide.

Only in New York would politicians complain about the blight of middle-aged European tourists asking for directions. Force out one population, and you leave a hole for another one to fill. You only hope your new neighbor isn't the next Larry Hogue.