SundayReview|Editorial A Picasso in Trouble By THE EDITORIAL BOARDFEB. 22, 2014 The largest and most endangered Picasso many of us have never seen lives on Park Avenue, in the Seagram Building. To get to it, walk to East 52nd Street, past the idling Town Cars, through the door of the Four Seasons restaurant. Give a nod to the friendly coat-check guy, then head up the stairs, into the soaring space of the Grill Room, where the city’s uppermost crust is having lunch or drinks. Keep going into the corridor that leads to the Pool Room. Look right, and up. “Le Tricorne,” a bullfighting scene painted in 1919, was part of a stage curtain for the Ballets Russes. It is 19 feet by 20 feet and has hung in that space since the Four Seasons opened in 1959, though for how much longer, nobody knows. Aby Rosen, the developer who controls the building, wants to get rid of it. There’s not much he can do to the rest of the restaurant’s interior, a masterwork of Modernism designed by Philip Johnson and declared a landmark in 1989. But the Picasso is not protected, because it is not considered integral to the architecture. Mr. Rosen does not own the curtain — the New York Landmarks Conservancy does — but he may be able to evict it. Mr. Rosen, saying the curtain needed to go so he could repair the limestone wall around it, tried to have the curtain taken down on Feb. 9. The conservancy sued, arguing that removing the brittle 95-year-old curtain would likely destroy it. A State Supreme Court judge agreed to halt any move pending a hearing on March 11. The conservancy and its supporters may not have the legal grounds to defeat Mr. Rosen, but they are clearly hoping that public sentiment will soften his heart. They fear not just harm to the curtain, but aesthetic damage to Johnson’s magnificent space, which critics note was designed as a Gesamtkunstwerk, an artistic whole dependent upon all its parts, from the walls and lights down to the flatware and plates. A writer in The New York Review of Books, sharply questioning Mr. Rosen’s taste and decency, recently rhapsodized about the Picasso’s “dusky mauve and ochre tonalities” and “palpable Iberian duende,” which — so you don’t have to look it up — is what flamenco music and Javier Bardem also have. Those who seldom or never dine at the Four Seasons may feel estranged from an argument about the artistic integrity of a place where billionaires cluster over bluefin sashimi and roast squab with truffle sauce. But the survival of a Picasso, even a semipublic one, should concern everybody. The Museum of Modern Art has offered to store the Picasso but not to display it. So even if it does survive a move, that could be the last anyone sees of it. The far better outcome would be for the curtain to stay where Philip Johnson put it, where it belongs. It would be better still if the conservancy could find a way for regular New Yorkers to savor its duende without having to bring along at least $59 for the prix fixe lunch and — for gentlemen — a jacket. Meet The New York Times’s Editorial Board » A version of this editorial appears in print on February 23, 2014, on page SR10 of the New York edition with the headline: A Picasso in Trouble. Order Reprints|Todays Paper|Subscribe
Posted on: Sun, 23 Feb 2014 07:24:41 +0000
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