Museum in the dust
06 October 2001
By Margaret E Ward
Sunday Business Post Saturday, October 06, 2001
Sculptor Michael Richards spent his last evening on top of the world. After watching Monday night football in his studio on the 92nd floor of One World Trade Center with fellow artist Jeff Konigsberg, he knuckled down to the work at hand.
Richards’ two new sculptures, which revisited his favourite themes of flight and injustice, were nearing completion and he was determined to continue through the night.
The 38-year-old artist had previously cast life-size African-American figures from his own face and body, sometimes with aeroplanes jutting out from their abdomens. Now they took form as World War II pilots falling from the sky, tumbling into debris or riding flame-tailed meteors. As Richards worked, an autumn storm illuminated the distant Statue of Liberty and streaked the large studio windows with rain.
The next morning, Richards vanished along with his installations and thousands of other human beings. He was one of dozens of well-known modern artists whose masterpieces were destroyed in the September 11 terrorist attack, but the only one to forfeit his life.
Somewhere among the rubble and lost lives lay works by Auguste Rodin, Joan Miro, Roy Lichtenstein, Alexander Calder and Louise Nevelson, their combined value in the region of US$100 million. They were part of New York City’s proud public and private art heritage. The twin towers served as a huge art gallery as its walls and plazas were lined with works commissioned or purchased by the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey.
When the buildings were under construction in the 1960s, the organisation set aside 1 per cent of the cost for public art and later produced photographs of the collection in the book, Art for the Public.
Many visitors and locals enjoyed, or were puzzled by, some of these modern pieces. Anyone traipsing across the expanse outside to buy half-price theatre tickets at TKTS in the lobby or to catch a subway saw installations such as Red Stabile, a 25-foot work by Alexander Calder at Seven World Trade Center or Fritz Koenig’s outdoor revolving globe.
Inside, on the mezzanine of Two WTC, Joan Miro’s 1974 World Trade Center Tapestry was on display. Elsewhere, paintings by David Hockney and Roy Lichtenstein and sculptures by Masayuki Nagare and James Rosati intrigued and tantalised viewers. All are gone.
Many Wall Street companies and law firms located in the twin towers and nearby adorned their spaces with original and rare pieces of art. The best known was the ‘museum in the sky’ in the offices of Cantor Fitzgerald, the firm on the top floor which lost almost 700 of its 1,000 employees.
The company’s founder, B Gerald Cantor, was famously “touched” by the Hand of God, a marble sculpture by Rodin, during a 1945 visit to the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Art. A year and a half later he owned a bronze version, and went on to add almost 750 more sculptures, drawings and memorabilia to the Iris and B Gerald Cantor Collection. This was the largest and most comprehensive private collection of works by Auguste Rodin in the world. Most were given away to museums, but more than 350 that were in the WTC are missing.
AXA Nordstern Art Insurance, the world’s largest art insurer, has said losses will top $100 million. AXA, which insured the Rodin sculptures, has set aside $20 million for its share of the claims. One art expert has placed the value of Red Stabile alone at $25 million.
Some pieces have managed to survive. Roy Lichtenstein’s Modern Head, a 30-foot sculpture is covered in dust and debris but largely intact. An art restorer has said she saw one of Nevelson’s works as well as a piece by Dubuffet in the rubble. Louise Nevelson was one of America’s most renowned Jewish female sculptors, but it is not clear if the piece is Sky Gate, an interpretation of the Manhattan skyline at night made with painted wood chair slats and barrel staves. It was her largest work in wood.
One hugely popular outdoor sculpture has been visible in newspaper photographs and TV reports. Double Check, a bronze sculpture of a middle-aged businessman peering inside his briefcase by J Seward Johnson Jr, was a favourite repository for notes and sandwiches before the disaster.
Now the Merrill Lynch-commissioned figure looks like an old man, his hair and suit powdered an ash grey. Flowers sit in his lap and candles at his feet — an unofficial memorial to the dead office workers and rescuers. A note taped to the top of the briefcase reads: “In memory of those who gave their lives to try and save so many.”
The names of individual fire-fighters, police and emergency medical service workers have been added to the single sheet of paper.
The loss of these artworks is incomparable to the suffering of the thousands who died and those who unwittingly bore witness to it. This has been acknowledged by the artists who worked alongside Michael Richards in the space provided by the World View programme, a joint project between the Lower Manhattan Cultural Council (LMCC) and the Port Authority of NY and NJ.
Only two of the 25 artists with studios in Tower One were there that morning. Vanessa Lawrence had gone in at 6am to paint the city below in the early light but went to the lobby to phone a friend before the first plane hit. All the World View artists, including Lawrence, have lost their work but more importantly they are missing a friend. The artists told the online publication, Artswire that such devastation puts everything in perspective. Some felt their work was frivolous. Monika Bravo was initially unable to go back to work, and wondered if she really wanted to be an artist any more.
Bravo, who uses video recordings, reviewed images of the city she recorded from her WTC space over several hours on the evening of September 10, a record of its last night standing. “These images depicted a thunderstorm in progress; the raindrops falling on the windows allude to the trillions of tears as if the buildings felt that it was imminent,” she told Artwire. But she is one of the lucky ones. Although many of the artists in residence lost all of their life’s work, Richards lost his life and the opportunity to create anew.
Days after the attack, many creative people started working again with a determined focus. Museum curators saw a shift from artists’ hopelessness to a desperate need to contribute something to society. Directors at the Whitney Museum and the New Museum of Contemporary Art fielded many calls from those who wanted to create memorials. The art community felt a new sense of purpose and acknowledged that art is the best way for them to express their feelings about the world, both good and bad.
New York City is looking for inner peace following the tragedy — and many people believe the arts are the best way to pull the nation together to heal its collective soul. The city carefully dismantled the remaining metal arches of Tower Two for possible use in a memorial.
For many, Jamaican-American Michael Richards’ work on the Tuskegee Airmen gives form to these losses and would be a fitting tribute to those who died. These airmen were a segregated unit of African-American pilots, which was awarded more than 150 Flying Crosses for valour during World War II. They suffered great injustice and discrimination at the hands of their colleagues and members of the public.
Like Richards’s two lost works, previous airmen sculptures were bronze or steel cast from his own body. Tar Baby vs St Sebastian depicts a fully uniformed airman with hands at his sides, chin titled skywards, palms helplessly turned out as small planes impale his body. His feet are several inches from the ground, as if he were levitating like a saint or martyr ascending to heaven. In the context of September 11, it looks hopelessly poignant.
ARichards sculpture at the Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota Are You Down? portrays three seated black men slumped over with their backs to a bull’s-eye target.
The Village Voice newspaper reported that Richards composed an artistic statement on his computer and passed it along to a friend. He said the Tuskegee Airmen fought for democracy in the sky, but faced discrimination on the ground. “They serve as symbols of failed transcendence and loss of faith escaping the pull of gravity, but always forced back to the ground, lost navigators always seeking home,” he wrote.
Experts say art can speak of tragedy and loss as effectively as it can of beauty, but it rarely predicts the future. One of the most famous horror-based works is Picasso’s Guernica which was inspired by the destruction of this town in 1937 during the Spanish Civil War.
Declan McGonagle, the Irish curator and writer says: “It’s very rare in the modern era for artists to pick up a subject and attempt to describe the horror of conflict or pain and suffering.” Violent imagery might be a curious way to offset the potential reality of what could happen in the world.
McGonagle said Francis Bacon, whose work deals with the edges of experience and reality, once commented that life always leaves art behind when it comes to horror. Artists find it very difficult to deal with the enormity of incidents such as war, the holocaust or the attack on the twin towers.
John Hock, curator of Franconia Sculpture Park in Minnesota, who met Richards when he was an artist-in-residence, says great art can predict the future and expose the truth. “I hate to think Michael’s art became this absurd reality, but the work we have, and his others, show how artists tap into the collective consciousness.”
Some political artists tend to raise the flag and show the warning signs of things to come — so perhaps he was seeing something we couldn’t, said Hock.
WTC Art Project 