The map & the territory

THE NEW CRITERION, September 2024

The map & the territory

On the life & work of Joe Zucker.

The art world never knew what to make of Joe Zucker, a painter who died in May at the age of eighty-two. Just as pirates became a recurring theme in his work, Zucker took a piratical stance on art history. He refashioned the flotsam and jetsam of pictorial space to raise his own Jolly Roger over the scurvy dogs of modernism in a way that fit nobody’s story of art but his own.

Like Augie March, Zucker was “an American, Chicago born.” Growing up Jewish on the city’s South Side, he spent his childhood at the museum of the Art Institute. His father was a scrap-metal dealer. His mother, a nurse, deposited him at the museum starting at an early age to avoid the ethnic warfare of the streets. Here he absorbed an aesthetic education that was democratic and particularly American, one that flattened chronology and place—a “Veronese one day, a de Kooning the next, Van Gogh’s Bedroom in Arles,” he said. Back home, through an affinity for literature and narrative, he further mixed high and low—Willa Cather with Studs Terkel, Herman Melville with N. C. Wyeth’s illustrations for Treasure Island.

Chuck Close, Joe Zucker, 1969, Gelatin silver print, Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City.

After a stint at Miami University of Ohio, where he played basketball, Zucker returned to Chicago. He enrolled at the School of the Art Institute, earning his undergraduate and graduate degrees. He joked that here he learned to draw a skeleton riding a bicycle from memory. As with much of Zucker’s artistic identity, this was fact and fiction mixed in a medium of dry wit. The tall tale reflects the degree of technical training he received without any particular sense for what to do with it, especially since he said he never wanted to be the next jock from the School of Paris flexing a Picasso brush. “My real love is being an artist and making art,” he once said. “Not advancing the myth of modernism.”

As he stared at his canvas, an early moment of doubt became Zucker’s first artistic breakthrough. Uncertain what to paint, he set about depicting the painting itself—in particular, the warp and weft of the canvas’s weave. His subsequent abstractions of interwoven rectangles brought to mind the rigors of Piet Mondrian but also the basket weaves of brightly colored plastic lawn chairs, which were then a ubiquitous feature of demotic Americana. Zucker’s interest in vernacular, in the elevation of craft and domesticity against the backdrop of high art, in grids and recursive rules, and in the conflation of process and product, were already apparent and continued throughout his career. His circular logic could be confounding, but Zucker flavored such Möbius strips like salt-water taffy—palatable, mysterious, and (as his last name might suggest) sweet.

After teaching at the Minneapolis School of Art, Zucker moved to New York in 1968. He soon fell in with Klaus Kertess and the iconoclastic artists he was showing at his Bykert Gallery, who included Lynda Benglis, Dorothea Rockburne, Barry Le Va, and Brice Marden. Among them was Chuck Close, who became Zucker’s loft neighbor on Prince Street and drinking buddy as they taught together at the School of Visual Arts. In one of his early portraits, Close depicted Zucker in horn-rimmed glasses and shirt and tie, with his hair slicked back in a way that resembled an overtaxed insurance salesman. A study for this work is now in the collection of the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Joe Zucker, Amy Hewes, 1976, Acrylic, cotton & rhoplex on canvas, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

“Joe Zucker has consistently for over four decades been one of America’s most innovative artists,” Close wrote for Bomb magazine in 2007.

His paintings are personal, quirky, idiosyncratic, and often puzzling. His style is rooted in processes, some simple, others remarkably complex. . . . Pouring, squeezing and manipulating paint, he fashions paintings so personal it would be impossible to imagine anyone else having made them. This is the definition of personal invention.

Close went on to say of Zucker that there was “no greater influence on the way I think about painting, and no person who played a more important role in the formative period of my work and changed my mind about how paintings can and should be made.”

A decade later, when I assembled an exhibition of Zucker’s depictions of the sea for the National Arts Club, Close wheeled into the opening. As I plied him with martinis, he explained how he and Zucker together learned to develop processes to complicate and “de-skill” their means of representation. “This is something you and I have spent a lot of time doing, removing the taboo of talent,” Zucker said in response to Close in that 2007 interview. Here was a problem, I concluded, only for those specimens for whom pictorial talent comes too easily.

As might any artist who chooses to start his career by painting the materials of a painting, Zucker next set about working up an index for his oeuvre-to-be. The 100-Foot-Long Piece (1968–69) is the first work he made in New York. In the 2020 monograph on Zucker published by Thames & Hudson, Terry R. Myers wrote how the work was “like a catalogue of available merchandise (as he called it, ‘the Sears catalogue’),” one that “retains many of the material characteristics of life in the suburban Midwest.” Made up of rectangular strips in a range of styles, some abstract, others representational, created through a wide array of processes, the mixed-media work can resemble a row of linoleum patterns or wallpaper swatches. Faux fabrics are intermixed with a depiction of Billy the Kid. An illustration of the Charioteer of Delphi is featured alongside cones of mathematical plotting-paper sticking out from the picture plane. “One area was wood-burned,” Close approvingly remarked. “When was the last time you saw a work of art by a serious artist that was made with a wood-burning kit?” A young secretary at Kertess’s gallery dubbed the work “tossed salad.” That secretary, Mary Boone, went on to become a mega-gallerist of the 1980s and even represented Zucker for a period in the 2000s. “It was as if all my styles I made at once, rather than the more usual linear development of style,” Zucker remarked. “I made enough styles to last a lifetime.”

Joe Zucker, Paying Off Old Debts, 1975, Acrylic, cotton & rhoplex on canvas, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

Writing an introductory essay for the 2020 monograph, John Elderfield noted that Zucker may have developed up to eighty different series through his career: “Having many sides is integral to his self-presentation as artist.” The 100-Foot-Long Piece featured a preview of the one that became his most consequential: his cotton-ball paintings. Zucker developed these works using Rhoplex, an acrylic binder developed in the 1950s by the Rohm and Haas chemical company for use in cement and spackle with an “exceptional pigment-binding capacity.” By dipping cotton balls in Rhoplex, which he then hand-tinted and adhered to canvas, Zucker devised a method of painting that resembled a pixelated screen, one that could convey a recognizable image.

At first Zucker used this labor-intensive process to draw a connection to Byzantine mosaics. Woman with Halo and Scepter (from Five Mosaics) (1972), which referenced the art of Ravenna, is now in the collection of the Art Institute. Five Amphoras (1972) is at the Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth. From a distance, the works read as recognizable images. Up close, the brightly colored cotton balls resemble piles of tufted carpet. “It took months to roll up the pieces of paint,” Zucker said of his process, “and then all of the paintings were finished in a minute.”

Zucker then looked to the history of cotton and the role of labor in its cultivation and trade. Drawing on photographs of riverboat freight from the American South, Zucker loaded his imagery with historical import at a time when few contemporary artists dared look beyond the clean surfaces of minimalism or the safety of pop aesthetics. Rendered in grisaille, reflecting old photographic source material, subjects such as the riverboat in Amy Hewes (1976), in the collection of the Hessel Museum of Art at Bard College, and the laborer in Paying Off Old Debts (1975), in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago, convey a haunting presence, as if the history of American slavery were reaching out through the very cotton of the works.

By the time I first came across Zucker’s work, some twenty years ago, he had long since moved to East Hampton, Long Island, where he established a home and studio in the 1980s with his wife, Britta Le Va. Here he coached high-school basketball as a volunteer for the championship Bridgehampton team with players far removed from the area’s multimillion-dollar summer residences. (His efforts were featured in the 2017 documentary Killer Bees, produced by Shaquille O’Neal, about the team as it defended its state title.)

Joe Zucker, Russian Empire, 2012, Watercolor & gypsum on plywood, Mary Boone Gallery, New York.

Zucker was ahead of his time in his use of unorthodox materials and techniques, not to mention his resurfacing of fraught historical subject matter. Yet the Neo-Expressionists and the “Pictures Generation” of the 1970s and 1980s had little use for his involved and at times confusing work. Nevertheless he continued to develop new series, drawing on everything from pegboards and squeegees to the history of Joseph Smith, sometimes combining all three.

The work centered on shipping, marine life, and piracy could be his most satisfying. A 2008 exhibition at Nyehaus Gallery called “Plunder,” which featured rolls of canvas cut through with cannonballs, was particularly successful. For Zucker, the map was the territory. Allegory and allusion mixed with the concrete. “The ghostly spectre of the slaver Trinidad rises among the wrecks and reefs of Madagascar on a moonlit night during July of 1834,” he scrawled across a drawing from 1978, which I first saw at
Nolan/Eckman Gallery. On a diagrammatic image called Axe Lake (Legend) (1994), Zucker included a key that listed the fishing spots and mills along with his vodka martinis and gibsons.

Water served as a recurring theme in Zucker’s churned processes. He saw a connection between the surface of the painting and the “machinery depicted in the painting—objects that stir water, such as planes, windmills, ships, wheels.” It helped that Zucker was himself an accomplished fisherman—skills he developed through weeks-long expeditions to Minnesota and as the captain of a fishing boat he docked in Montauk harbor called The Rodfather. Following a few occasions when I paid studio visits to East Hampton, we motored out to the reefs off Montauk. Zucker knew just the right time and place to put down line for striped bass as he named the fish he caught. “Nancy Pelosi” was his keeper. I called mine “Mahmoud A. Bass.”

In East Hampton, Zucker developed several series that hearkened back to the warp-and-weft grids. I am unsure if one series involving mops dipped in paint, arranged on the wall as if woven together, has ever been fully executed. Another series, of gypsum board hand-scored and water-colored into tight grids resembling tesserae, recalled those earlier Rhoplex mosaics. He titled the 2013 exhibition of this series at Mary Boone “Empire Descending a Staircase.”

Joe Zucker, Robocrate Flagship #2 (1955–1960), 2004, Watercolor, ink & graphite on paper, David Nolan Gallery, New York.

Zucker’s final series was inspired by stories of the Pale of Settlement by Sholem Aleichem, which he read during the 2020 covid shutdowns. Made of cast-off studio trash, such as cardboard, towels, and rubber mats, the austere monochrome paintings of shtetl houses and abstracted snowmen, depicted in a chilling, white landscape, felt like a fresh airing of sublimated forces and materials. In the summer of 2022, I paid my final studio visit to see this work. Zucker by then had already suffered a series of health setbacks, including the consequences of a traffic accident and metabolic encephalopathy. As I slept on a cot in his spider-filled studio, I could hear Zucker in the other room narrating his own demise.

“There’s a surprise to his work,” the critic and poet John Yau explained as I sat down for an interview with him and Zucker in 2016. “The humor is very generous. If anything he’s self-mocking. He’s mocking the idea of being an artist, but in a kind of generous way.” In much of Zucker’s work, as in my final moments with him, you never know whether to laugh or cry.

Summer lights

THE NEW CRITERION, June 2024

Summer Lights

On “Klimt Landscapes” at Neue Galerie, “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” at Acquavella Galleries & “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon” at Bookstein Projects, New York.

A distinguishing feature of modern art has been its pursuit of light. Of course, all of visual art is concerned with light. What modernism did was dispense with the controlled light of the salon in search of bolder and brighter sensations. Modern painters looked to reflect not merely a sense of sight but also the feeling of radiance. So they explored direct light and, in particular, summer light, chasing the sun into the countryside with their trunks of painting equipment in tow.

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was one of those painters whose compositional innovations were charged by the summer sun. A recent survey at Neue Galerie titled “Klimt Landscapes” looked not only to the verdant visions he captured in the Austrian towns alongside the Attersee between 1900 and 1916, but also to the lush creative landscape that unfurled around him in photography, jewelry, and fashion.1

Gustav Klimt, Judith and the Head of Holofernes, 1901, Oil & gold on canvas, Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna.

Today Klimt is most renowned for his “golden style.” His bejeweled portraits reached their apotheosis in such works at Judith and the Head of Holofernes (1901), also known as Judith I, and The Kiss (1908–09), both in the Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna. His Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907), the “lady in gold” restituted from Vienna to the subject’s Jewish heirs, now forms the heart of Neue’s permanent collection. In these works, Klimt, the son of a gold engraver, combined the decadence of precious metal with a sense for mosaic-like composition, taking inspiration from the shadowless Byzantine iconography in Ravenna’s Basilica of San Vitale.

Yet Klimt was more than an iconographer. He looked to move beyond these studied, labor-intensive portraits even as he relied on them to provide income for his large domestic payroll (he fathered at least six children with three mistresses while supporting multiple members of his extended family, including his widowed sister-in-law, Emilie “Midi” Flöge, a fashion designer and his muse). Klimt found relief in the Salzkammergut region of Upper Austria, north of Salzburg. Each summer, after 1900, he traveled there from Vienna to paint along the lake towns of the Attersee.

Gustav Klimt, The Park, 1909, Oil on canvas, Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Organized by Janis Staggs, Neue’s director of curatorial and manager of publications, “Klimt Landscapes” took a welcome, wide-angle view of these creative sojourns. The exhibition brought together such masterpieces as The Park (1909, Museum of Modern Art, New York), Kammer Castle on the Attersee I (Castle in the Lake) (1908, National Gallery Prague), and Forester’s House in Weissenbach II (Garden) (1914, Neue Galerie). The survey assembled works dating back to Klimt’s academic training and continuing on through his many experiments with optics, providing along the way several examples of jewelry by Josef Hoffmann and Koloman Moser together with many photographic portraits of Klimt’s own projections of summer leisure.

Trained at the Vienna School of Arts and Crafts of the Imperial Royal Austrian Museum of Art and Industry, known today as the Museum of Applied Arts Vienna, Klimt proved to be a precocious academic talent. The exhibition began with his figure studies of 1880 and his Two Girls with Oleander (ca. 1890–92, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford), an astonishing vision of glowing Pre-Raphaelite women plucking flowers beside an egg-and-dart frieze.

Gustav Klimt, Two Girls with Oleander, ca. 1890–92, Oil on canvas, Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford.

Seeing Klimt’s command of painterly illusion makes his modernist compression, developed just a few years later, all the more remarkable. A founding member of the Vienna Secession in 1897, he joined fellow academic painters to look beyond the style of the salon. Yet for all of its innovative surface application, Klimt’s subsequent golden style owed much to academic structure. Beneath the ornament, his shimmering portraits were essentially salon paintings. Part academic, part modern, these works were dismissed by the devotees of either camp. Klimt remained largely absent, for example, from the French-focused timeline of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. As such distinctions have diminished over time, however, the hybrid nature of these works has only made them more compelling. Today his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I has become known as “Austria’s Mona Lisa” and attracts commensurate crowds and Hollywood fanfare, serving as the focus of the 2015 biographical drama Woman in Gold.

The relief provided by the Attersee owed in part to the fact that Klimt had received little academic training in landscape painting, which was considered a lower genre than history painting and portraiture. This lack of schooling left Klimt free to experiment with the Stimmungsimpressionismus, or “atmospheric impressions,” that he felt during his Sommerfrische, “summer holidays.” Unlike his studied portraits, Klimt painted his landscapes without preparatory sketches. The unidealized composition of this “vacation work” helps underscore the leisure of their creation. Klimt viewed his landscape painting as a segment of his daily therapy. A letter from August 1902 outlines his summer workout routine:

Early in the morning, about 6 . . . I get up—if the weather’s good I go to the nearby wood—I’m painting a small beech wood there (if the sun’s shining) . . . that takes me to 8, then comes breakfast, then a swim in the lake, carefully of course—then I paint a little, perhaps a view of the lake by sunlight, or if the weather’s dull a landscape from my window—sometimes I drop this morning painting and study my Japanese books . . . Then comes midday, after lunch I sleep a little or read, and before or after tea another swim . . . After tea I’m painting again . . . . Every now and then I fit a bit of rowing into the day’s program in order to limber up.

A proponent of the Gesamtkunstwerk, Klimt saw himself as a piece of that “total work of art.” In the summer he dressed the part by dispensing with the cummerbund and donning a blue, caftan-style painter’s smock. (Early Christmas shoppers, take note: Neue’s gift shop features an “exact replica” of this full length indigo linen smock with “hand-embroidered white epaulets and front pocket.”) Klimt appears in repeated photographs around the Attersee in this getup, walking on docks and strolling on trails, even as the figures around him didn’t always get the caftan memo, appearing in more standard summer outfits.

Beech Forest in Autumn, 1898. Photo: Hugo Henneberg, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin.

One revelation of this survey was the extent to which photography influenced and shaped Klimt’s own artistic landscape. “It would be difficult to overestimate the sizable impact of photography on Klimt’s development as a landscape painter,” writes Staggs in the exhibition’s catalogue. The Austrian Camera Club of Amateur Photographers, later known as the Vienna Camera Club, was established in 1887. Klimt surrounded himself with photographers such as Moriz Nähr, Heinrich Böhler, and Emma Bacher-Teschner, and he regularly posed as their subject. Klimt developed his own unusual, square landscape format largely under the influence of their often-square images. He also used telescopes and photographic aids to help compose his paintings, flattening his landscapes and even drawing on the patterns of photographic emulsion. Just compare Hugo Henneberg’s photograph Birch Forest in Autumn (1898, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin) with Klimt’s Beech Forest I of circa 1902 (Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden), or Heinrich Kuehn’s Meadow with Trees (1897, Photoinstitut Bonartes, Vienna) with Klimt’s Pear Tree (Pear Trees) (1903, Harvard Art Museums). Klimt painted his landscapes in the style of this early photography.

Gustav Klimt, Beech Forest I, 1902, Oil on canvas, Galerie Neue Meister, Dresden.

The remarkable set of Autochrome Lumière color photographs that Friedrich G. “Fritz” Walker took of Emilie Flöge and Klimt, in the garden of Villa Paulick in September of 1913, then brought the exhibition full circle. Early photography, in particular color photography, was especially light-intensive and relied on the same summer sun as did Klimt. Here in colorful costumes he and Flöge appear as both subjects and objects—flattened into their own lush landscapes in these photographic “drawings with light.” From “lady in gold,” we end with artists in green.

The advent of summer can be particularly sweet when it comes with a helping of Wayne Thiebaud (1920–2021). The late grand-manner painter of American Century marginalia remains on view at Acquavella Galleries through mid-June with an exhibition that focuses on his warmest creations. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” gathers works from over six decades of the artist’s career, ranging from his bathers, beaches, and balls to his cola, confections, and cones.2

Wayne Thiebaud, Untitled (Six Soda Pop Bottles), ca. 1985, Watercolor on paper, Collection of Matt and Maria Bult.

Painted with a sugary impasto, this masterly work can seem fresh and ready to melt in the summer sun. Thiebaud was the American Giorgio Morandi for his uncanny ability to transform paint into the subjects he depicted. In part this is due to the halation effects along his edges, as shadows are broken into lines and fields of blue and red that become delicate frosting for his forms, as seen in such works as Strawberry Cone (1969) and Two Tulip Sundaes (2010) and even such portraits as Betty Jean (ca. 1965). Thiebaud was particularly attuned to the textures of his media. His thirst-quenching Untitled (Six Soda Pop Bottles) (ca. 1985) would only work as a watercolor on paper. His Cheese Display (1969) feels milky-smooth, while his Beach Gathering (2000–15) appears encrusted with sand. Due to this innate sense for intimism, I find his portraits and still lifes work better than his landscapes. Thiebaud was at his best when subject and painting could melt into one.

The paintings in “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon,” on view last month at Bookstein Projects, spanned a remarkable eighty years.3 A suite of bold new work, of celestial bodies pared down to brushstroke, color, and form, all painted in Resika’s ninety-fifth year, was connected to Moonlight, a small landscape executed in 1943–44, when the artist was just sixteen years old. Beyond the official show, the gallery’s office also featured an extra work from the artist’s collection: Panorama of the Hudson (The Mermaid and the Factory) (1948), a wild composition of bridges, train tracks, and the ghost-like rollercoaster of the long-departed Palisades Amusement Park—painted at a time when the teenage artist could catch a ferry there just across town from his Central
Harlem studio.

Paul Resika, Moonlight, 1943–44, Oil on canvas, Bookstein Projects, New York.

The brightness and compositions may have varied, but everywhere a minimum of line defined depth in what were otherwise blind, blinding, and turbulent sights. Illuminated across time, the full assembly revealed a consistency of vision and a connected sense for the bare essentials. Revisiting the illusion of light in paint, Resika in his latest work has doubled down on the experimental quality of what can be done with a minimum of means. In several canvases, a simple dash, placed just right, becomes a horizon line reflecting the luminous spheres above. These orbs, all of slightly different values, meanwhile appear to fill the canvases with various shades of glowing color. “Marcel Breuer told me never to paint a green picture,” Resika explained to me when I ran into him at the gallery. So he did just that. This painter, who has been bucking convention for eighty years, remains a guiding light for the daring possibilities of oil on canvas.

Paul Resika, End of the Day #12, Oil on canvas, 2023, Bookstein Projects, New York.

1. “Klimt Landscapes” was on view at Neue Galerie, New York, from February 15 through May 6, 2024. 

2. “Wayne Thiebaud: Summer Days” opened at Acquavella Galleries, New York, on April 26 and remains on view through June 14, 2024. 

3. “Paul Resika: Ode to the Moon” was on view at Bookstein Projects, New York, from April 18 through May 31, 2024. 

Curtains for Lincoln Center

THE NEW CRITERION, May 2024

Curtains for Lincoln Center

On the falsification of Lincoln Center’s history.

During the high dudgeon of the Black Lives Matter movement, New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts joined the chorus of handwringers with a particular twist. “In our 60+ year history, we have not done nearly enough. It is part of our job now to help change the status quo,” read the center’s “Message on Our Commitment to Change.” Lincoln Center’s multiple concert venues may have been shuttered by the pandemic. Its institutional constituents, which include the Metropolitan Opera, the New York Philharmonic, and the New York City Ballet, were facing the prospect of millions of dollars in losses. Yet as its first priority, the center determined to dedicate itself to

Telling the story of Lincoln Center from our beginning, in its truth. The displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families that took place prior to the construction of our campus is abhorrent. We may never know its full impact on those dispossessed of the land on which Lincoln Center sits. But only by acknowledging this history can we begin to confront the racism from which our institution has benefited.

With the blood-and-soil essentialism of today’s identity politics, the commitment to “confront[ing] the racism from which our institution has benefited” and “telling the story of Lincoln Center from our beginning, in its truth” fell in line with the new progressive rhetoric of land acknowledgments, colonialist dispossession, and supposedly unearthed legacies of systemic oppression. The diagnosis also presented an opportunity for Lincoln Center’s younger leadership, remote-working members of a new generation of the managerial class, to treat their organization’s “abhorrent” injustices against “Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families” with their own patent mixture of tinctures, elixirs, and balms. How much of this “truth” is in fact true was beside the point. By design, their cure would be worse than the disease.

For the racial pathologists, in the case of Lincoln Center this sickness was malignant, metastasizing, and neglected for far too long: the center’s four-block complex owed its existence not just to Peter Minuit’s alleged swindling of Mannahatta for sixty guilders back in 1626, but also to the supposed destruction of a vibrant black community known as San Juan Hill some three centuries on. This culturally vital neighborhood of residences, businesses, and theaters, where Thelonious Monk lived and James P. Johnson developed the Charleston, was targeted in the 1950s by no less than Robert Moses for one of his largest projects of urban renewal. Such “slum clearance,” scattering seven thousand families and eight hundred businesses, paved over those “Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families,” as the leadership of Lincoln Center now represents its origin story, with white travertine and white culture.

Coming clean with these supposed injustices, Lincoln Center focused its post-pandemic programming not on Mozart or Stravinsky as it once might have done, but on turning its land acknowledgment into a multistage extravaganza. In 2022, commissioned by Lincoln Center in collaboration with the Studio Museum in Harlem and the Public Art Fund, the organization plastered a 68-by-150-foot mural called San Juan Heal at the corner of Broadway and Sixty-fifth Street across the northern façade of David Geffen Hall—formerly known as Avery Fisher Hall and, originally, Philharmonic Hall. Here the artist Nina Chanel Abney mixed symbols referencing ragtime and jazz alongside such phrases as “homage,” “honor,” and “urban renewal?”

Nina Chanel Abney, San Juan Heal, 2022, Latex ink & vinyl mounted on glass, David Geffen Hall, New York.

Geffen Hall’s inaugural opening night with its resident orchestra, the New York Philharmonic, then featured a new “immersive multimedia work” called San Juan Hill: A New York Story. Created by Etienne Charles, this piece brought together, according to its billing, “music, visuals, and original first-person accounts of the history of the San Juan Hill neighborhood and the indigenous and immigrant communities that populated the land in and around where Lincoln Center resides.”

To make the story more explicit, Lincoln Center and the New York Philharmonic arranged for a graffiti crew known as the ex vandals to paint a mural for the center’s Amsterdam Avenue façade. Conceived by a musician and tagger known as “Wicked Gary” Fritz, the work presented the black historical figures of San Juan Hill on the left, a depiction of the modern Lincoln Center plaza on the right, and a wrecking ball crashing through the middle. “This was a thriving Black community that they took out to bring in Lincoln Center,” Fritz explained to Ebony magazine at the unveiling.

A year later, Lincoln Center launched an online “hub” on its institutional website, called “Legacies of San Juan Hill” and dedicated to “interrogating our role in this history.” Here we can read of the “old, long disgraced story, the one in which benevolent city fathers swept in to rescue the city from slums and blight.” San Juan Hill “may have been run down, a source of hardship and deprivation, but the cure was worse than the curse,” continues one article. “Clearance and rebuilding scattered neighbors, broke apart fragile social networks, uprooted working class communities, destroyed jobs, targeted people of color for removal, and deepened racial segregation.”

Lincoln Center’s latter-day struggle sessions have played into a new media environment in which race-based narratives are an editorial imperative. “Before Lincoln Center, San Juan Hill Was a Vibrant Black Community,” went one headline in The New York Times. “A vibrant neighborhood known as San Juan Hill, which was home to many low-income Black and Latino residents, was razed to make way for the center’s construction,” went another article. Whatever the historical reality or the artistic merits of the San Juan Hill initiative, Lincoln Center banked its post-pandemic recovery on a narrative of its own abhorrence, developing programming and even a new campus plan around its “original sin” of race-based displacement. The one problem with such self-abnegation is that Lincoln Center’s historical record turns out to be far less loathsome than what its leadership represented, and even exculpatory of the crimes to which they now confess.

When Black Lives Matter becomes a marketing strategy, facts offer little impediment to “truth.” In the case of Lincoln Center, this new battle of San Juan Hill has ultimately been a story of conflation, exaggeration, and wishful thinking. The history of Lincoln Center and the neighborhood that came before it both deserve genuine appreciation, observed beyond the hothouse of race-based managerialism.

There indeed was a time when San Juan Hill—an area roughly defined as Manhattan’s far West Sixties, backed up against the New York Central Railroad’s sprawling Sixtieth Street Yard along the Hudson River—was a nexus of black New York. The bohemian energy that enlivened this neighborhood’s small theaters and nightclubs also attracted artists to the Lincoln Arcade, a loft building and theater at Sixty-Fifth Street and Broadway where the Juilliard School now stands. Robert Henri, Milton Avery, Stuart Davis, and Marcel Duchamp all passed through its studios. For nine months in 1908–09, the playwright Eugene O’Neill even lived there in George Bellows’s basement studio, basing his 1914 play Butter and Bread on the experience. To its credit, articles on Lincoln Center’s “Legacies of San Juan Hill” web hub explore this history in greater detail.

An image from San Juan Hill prior to Lincoln Center’s development. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

But the cultural height of San Juan Hill came and went soon after the turn of the century. Manhattan’s own Great Migration saw black New Yorkers moving north from Greenwich Village through this West Side neighborhood on the way to Harlem. The “old law” tenements that filled out San Juan Hill’s narrow lots were made illegal after the city’s new code provisions of 1901 mandated greater setbacks for air and light—one explanation for why many black New Yorkers chose to move out of these overcrowded blocks. The advent of single-room-occupancy residences (after city housing law changed in 1939 to allow sros) and the conversion of several tenements into illegal business spaces further diminished the neighborhood’s housing stock. Garages, repair shops, gas stations, and utilities were intermixed into these blocks as extensions of the automobile row that still runs along Eleventh Avenue. Finally, centered among Irish, Italian, Polish, and other ethnic enclaves, the neighborhood became besieged with gang violence. The nickname of San Juan Hill, applied to an area that was officially known as Lincoln Square and Columbus Hill, may have been a reference to the black veterans who settled there after the Spanish–American War. Just as likely, the name came out of the ethnic warfare that famously inspired the musical West Side Story (which was filmed at the northern end of San Juan Hill just before demolition).

By the time New York turned its attention to redeveloping this section of the West Side, Robert Moses was not the only one who saw its deteriorating conditions and future potential. A decade before Lincoln Center ever took shape, the historical black center of San Juan Hill was leveled under Mayor Fiorello La Guardia to build Amsterdam Houses, an integrated housing project to the west of what is now Lincoln Center that opened in 1947, originally for veterans of the Second World War.

Proposed location of the Lincoln Square Project. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

By the 1950s, thanks to the Federal Housing Act of 1949, cities across the country were using and often abusing eminent domain to tap into federal funds for slum clearance. The Lincoln Square Renewal Project of 1955 is remarkable not for what it cleared—seventeen decrepit blocks between Sixtieth and Seventieth Streets—but for what was created in its place: not another urban highway as was cut through many other municipalities, but rather a Manhattan campus for Fordham University, a new headquarters for the American Red Cross, four thousand units of middle-income housing, and a campus for multiple performing arts organizations of world renown.

For an evenhanded account of its creation and endurance, Beacon to the World: A History of Lincoln Center, by Joseph W. Polisi, the former longtime president of the Juilliard School, ably updates Edgar B. Young’s Lincoln Center: The Building of an Institution of 1980.1

A preliminary design for the opera house at Lincoln Center, by Wallace K. Harrison, 1955. Photo courtesy of Columbia University.

“A persistent problem with the Center’s legacy is manifested in the ‘original sin’ it committed in the 1950s of displacing thousands of families living in the Lincoln Square neighborhood,” Polisi begins. “As with most retrospective historical scenarios, evaluating through a revisionist lens the decisions made at the birth of the Center may be a pointless exercise.”

At the time of demolition, the New York City Planning Commission determined that the neighborhood of Lincoln Square had become “clearly substandard and unsanitary . . . a blighting and depressing influence on surrounding sections contributing to gradual deterioration of the Upper West Side.” “Maintenance of buildings was neglected, building code violations were numerous, and fire hazards were great,” notes Young. “By 1955, the entire area was in an advanced state of decay” and “one of the city’s worst slums.”

Substandard living conditions identified by the slum clearance committee. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

New York City had identified the neighborhood of San Juan Hill for demolition and redevelopment long before the concept for a performing-arts center took hold. The idea for Lincoln Center only emerged after several of the city’s performing arts institutions found themselves in need of updated venues at the same time. The Metropolitan Opera had long ago outgrown its original home at Thirty-ninth Street and Broadway, an opulent Gilded Age venue but one with a limited back of house. Rockefeller Center and Columbus Circle were both considered as sites for relocation before Robert Moses approached the opera for his renewed Lincoln Square.

At the same time, the private owners of Carnegie Hall, the home of the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Society, at Fifty-Seventh Street and Seventh Avenue, had plans to tear down their storied venue and replace it with a high-rise office tower. The Philharmonic was sent scrambling after the landlords informed the orchestra its lease would not be renewed after its expiration in 1959. Finally, the New York City Ballet, part of City Center along with New York City Opera on West Fifty-fifth Street, was on the lookout for larger venues in order to stage George Balanchine’s ambitious ensemble works.

Proposed boundary map of the Lincoln Center Project. Photo: Lincoln Square Slum Clearance Plan, 1956.

As representatives for what would become Lincoln Center’s first three constituent organizations came together under the leadership of John D. Rockefeller III, the concept of a major new performing-arts center took shape and grew. The Juilliard School, then at West 122nd Street, and the special music collection of the New York Public Library, then located in the library’s main branch, were soon brought in as essential components for music education and research. Constituents for theater, film, chamber music, bel canto opera, jazz, and dance education eventually coalesced into the nearly dozen organizations that make up today’s Lincoln Center campus.

Under the Federal Housing Act of 1949, cities could draw on federal funds to purchase deteriorating neighborhoods through eminent domain and then sell the land for redevelopment at a discount. The difference between the purchase price and the sale price was known as the “land write-down,” for which the federal government financed two-thirds of the difference and, in the case of New York, the city and state split the remaining costs.

The groundbreaking ceremony for Lincoln Center Plaza, 1959. Photo: LIFE Photo Collection.

It is true that controversy surrounded the Lincoln Square Renewal Project at the time of demolition, but not for the creation of Lincoln Center. Instead, preservationists feared the loss of the Philharmonic would expedite the destruction of Carnegie Hall. Only at the last moment, even as its resident orchestra moved out, was the venue remarkably saved as a world-class home for visiting artists thanks to the violinist Isaac Stern, who convinced the city to purchase it. Legal challenges to the Lincoln Square plan primarily focused on the separation of church and state as it applied to the proposed campus of Fordham University, a Jesuit school, slated for the parcel to the south of Lincoln Center. The Supreme Court eventually dismissed this challenge to eminent domain in 1958.

Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts came together to function as the umbrella organization for its constituents as well as their benevolent landlord. The new nonprofit also became responsible for the demolition and redevelopment of its then-three-and-a-half-block campus. As the center took ownership of 188 existing buildings with 1,647 occupied units and 383 commercial tenants, it aided in the relocation of its residents and businesses. Many of those moved out of their office spaces were not dispossessed family-run operations but rather federal agencies housed in one of Lincoln Square’s modern buildings, at 70 Columbus Avenue, roughly on the site of what became the New York State Theater, now known as the David H. Koch Theater. Built as the twelve-story headquarters for the Uppercu Cadillac Corporation in 1927, by the 1950s this loft building was owned by Joseph P. Kennedy, who rented its floors to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and the Atomic Energy Commission. Given this family connection, it should come as little surprise that the city paid a premium for its appraisal and demolition.

Census on minority populations conducted New York Slum Clearance Committee. Photo: Preliminary Report on the Lincoln Square Project, 1956.

While the city lavished funds on the Kennedy clan, Lincoln Center kept close tabs on the residents it helped relocate through the redevelopment plan. Most of them remained in Manhattan, with nine hundred families staying on the Upper West Side. A study of the first 742 relocated revealed that they moved into larger quarters, all with up-to-date sanitary conditions. Most notably, for all of the “abhorrent” claims of the “displacement of Indigenous, Black, and Latinx families,” the census conducted by the Slum Clearance Committee of those relocated to create Lincoln Center revealed a population that was, in fact, overwhelmingly white: 75 percent of those displaced were white, 24.5 percent were Puerto Rican, and just 0.5 percent black. As it turns out, Lincoln Center’s latest racialized tort has been nothing more than a false confession.

Regardless of its ethnic breakdown, the redevelopment of a decrepit San Juan Hill into Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts indeed proved to be the “unparalleled cultural opportunity” that the New York City Planning Commission first envisioned, one that illustrates the bold, high-minded actions of the post-war city at its best. The site’s master plan, under the architect Wallace K. Harrison, took inspiration from Michelangelo’s Piazza del Campidoglio on the Capitoline Hill in Rome.

It is true that, in the extensive use of travertine marble, which is porous and absorbs water, Lincoln Center’s stone facings have fared far worse under New York’s freeze–thaw cycles than they would under the Italian sun. The center’s International Style architecture—designed by Harrison (the Metropolitan Opera House), Philip Johnson (the New York State Theater), Max Abramovitz (Philharmonic Hall), Eero Saarinen (the Vivian Beaumont Theater), Gordon Bunshaft (the Library and Museum of the Performing Arts), and Pietro Belluschi (the Juilliard School and Alice Tully Hall)—has also aged poorly, set off from the city streets in an austere, windswept design.

Lincoln Center Plaza under construction, 1964. Photo: Bob Serating Photo © Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

“Lincoln Center is a triumph of city planning,” wrote Myron Magnet in the Fall 2000 issue of City Journal, dedicated to reimagining the arts campus. “But as architecture, oh dear. The Center was deplorable, as critics recognized from the start.” A campus refresh by Diller Scofidio + Renfro, completed in 2010, did much to lighten the imposing complex along Sixty-fifth Street and extend Alice Tully Hall up to the angled street line of Broadway, but the bandshell at Damrosch Park, on the southwest corner of the campus, has never succeeded, just as the sides of Johnson’s State Theater remain an unarticulated travertine mass.

The center’s performance venues have faced their own challenges. The Metropolitan Opera House has too many seats but too little lobby space. The New York State Theater, renovated and renamed the David H. Koch Theater, may be well turned out for ballet but remains flat-footed for singers or orchestra, in part accounting for the fall of New York City Opera, which shared the space with City Ballet. Finally, Philharmonic Hall has been such an acoustical failure that it has been redone (and renamed) multiple times. Its latest iteration, as David Geffen Hall, solved many of the sonic challenges but destroyed the elegance of its public spaces, sourcing garish upholstery more in line with a bus terminal and slathering its surfaces with theatrical lighting, all in the name of presenting a more “inclusive” atmosphere.

Philharmonic Hall, 1963. Photo: Lincoln Center for Performing Art.

The synergies that might have been expected from the close contact of many arts organizations have also, just as often, led to internecine conflict. The profligate Metropolitan Opera helped bully City Opera out of existence and has long set itself apart from its neighbors while antagonizing its own audience with aggressive contemporary stagings. Before this latest renovation, the New York Philharmonic even explored a return to Carnegie Hall and the abandonment of Lincoln Center entirely. Most significantly, the umbrella organization of Lincoln Center has more than once been at cross-purposes with its constituents, promoting its own messaging and programs that can be in competition with the presenting organizations.

In their storied histories, the center’s famous constituents have nevertheless sustained and championed the performing arts while also truly revitalizing their surrounding community, including what remained of San Juan Hill. It is noteworthy that the childhood home of Thelonious Monk, in the Phipps Houses on West Sixty-third Street, was spared by the development of both Amsterdam Houses and Lincoln Center and survives to this day. The famous jazz pianist performed numerous times at Lincoln Center, beginning just a year after it opened, recording a live album at Philharmonic Hall in 1963. Late in life, Monk moved into an apartment in Lincoln Towers, in one of the high-rises built as part of the redevelopment plan. Due to these affinities, Monk liked to call his neighborhood not San Juan Hill or Lincoln Square or even the Upper West Side but simply “Lincoln Center.” Similarly, after Nina Simone started performing regularly at Lincoln Center in the late 1960s, she moved into another of the new apartment towers, in the same building as the vibraphonist Lionel Hampton—and also where I grew up. Finally, Jazz at Lincoln Center, a constituent organization founded in part by Wynton Marsalis in 1987 and located in the Time Warner Center since 2004, has done more to sustain the musical culture of San Juan Hill than any facile “commitment to change.”

Lincoln Center Plaza, 1965. Photo: Suzanna Faulkner Stevens.

Under the leadership of Henry Timms, Lincoln Center’s young British-born president and chief executive from 2019 until this year, Lincoln Center has merely updated its antagonism toward its constituents for the woke age. In 2021 Timms brought on Shanta Thake, a concert programmer from the Public Theater downtown, as the center’s chief artistic officer. Thake, whose full name is Shannon Shanta Thake-Kriegsman, may be of Indian-German descent, but she plays the race card as her ace in the hole. As their first order of business, Timms and Thake canceled “Mostly Mozart,” the center’s long-running summer festival. Thake pledged to “really confront our past head-on as we move into the future” by “opening this up and really saying that this is music that belongs to everyone”—implying, of course, that Mozart does not belong to everyone.

In the place of Mozart, the new administrators installed a ten-foot-wide disco ball above the plaza fountain and two hundred flamingo lawn ornaments. They also hired rappers, pop groups, and an LGBTQ mariachi band for their new summer performance series. “I’m more in the world of the downtown aesthetic of edgy, in your face, heavily transgressive stuff that comes from an emotional place,” Thake explained of her taste to The New York Times. “I’ve seen people dressed as chickens, covered in baby oil, dancing to the latest pop song.”

In 2023, it was announced that Louis Langrée, the summer festival’s director for twenty-one years, would be replaced by the thirty-year-old conductor Jonathon Heyward. “The next chapter for the orchestra doubles down on these successes and aims to further Shanta Thake’s broader artistic vision in service to all of New York City,” read the press announcement, “continuing to break down traditional artistic silos.” Plans for the coming summer include a “symphony of choice” concert, with audience members “curating” the program by popular vote, and an exhibition about depression tied to the mental health of Robert Schumann.

The Oasis Dance Floor, 2023. Photo: Lincoln Center for Performing Arts.

Lincoln Center now finds itself at a moment when the Metropolitan Opera, which under Peter Gelb has pushed progressive programming, continues to withdraw emergency funds from its endowment to cover sagging ticket sales and exorbitant operating losses—$40 million this year, $30 million last year. At the same time, Timms has pledged to open up the Lincoln Center campus architecturally to the tenants of Amsterdam Houses, to the west across Amsterdam Avenue, as a top priority. Just how much these residents will help fill out the opera’s dismal numbers remains to be seen, but it is noteworthy that the center’s existing staircase to Damrosch Park, from Amsterdam Avenue and Sixty-third Street, has remained locked through his tenure.

At the groundbreaking for Lincoln Center on May 14, 1959, President Dwight D. Eisenhower took a shovel to the campus’s future plaza and praised the center’s “stimulating approach to one of the nation’s pressing problems: urban blight.”

Here will occur a true interchange of the fruits of national cultures. From this will develop a growth that will spread to the corners of the earth, bringing with it the kind of human message that only individuals—not governments—can transmit. Here will develop a mighty influence for peace and understanding throughout the world.

The triumph of Lincoln Center has been to champion the best of our cultural patrimony. Over half a century, the project has fulfilled its promise by bringing the highest standards of classical music, ballet, opera, theater, film, and jazz to four city blocks in order to promote a “true interchange of the fruits of national cultures.” This has been the full legacy of San Juan Hill, now topped by an astonishingly ambitious and farsighted cultural achievement.