Art at Lincoln Center

Charles A. Riley

Description

The first volume to showcase both Lincoln Center's fabulous public art and the List Poster and Print collection, Art at Lincoln Center begins with a tour of the campus and the art that has been collected since its inception. A brief history of how the pieces were selected and brought to Lincoln Center follows (featuring Frank Stanton, David Rockefeller, and Philip Johnson who were the leading figures in building the collection) with charming anecdotes about the artists and the politics behind the selections of the artists and their works. The story of the creation of the List collection, with a focus on Vera List's formidable role, close the text portion of the book. The last portion is a complete catalog of the List print and poster collection.

Sujets

• Catalogs
• Collections
• Museo de Arte Moderno de Nueva York
• Catalog
• Metropolitan Opera House
• Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts
• Visual arts of the United States
• General officer
• Reclining Figure
• Art
• Collection
• General
• Henry Moore
• Jasper Johns
• Museum of Modern Art
• Lincoln Center
• Philip Johnson
• Marc Chagall
• Lincoln
• Public Art
• Exhibitions

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 01 mai 2009
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781620458952
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 7 Mo

Extrait

ART AT LINCOLN CENTER
ART AT LINCOLN CENTER
THE PUBLIC ART AND LIST PRINT AND POSTER COLLECTIONS
Charles A. Riley II, Ph.D.
Lincoln Center
This book is printed on acid-free paper.
Copyright 2009 by Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc. All rights reserved
Lincoln Center and Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts names and logos are registered trademarks of Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts, Inc., in the United States and other countries. Used here by license.
Published by John Wiley Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey Published simultaneously in Canada
Photo credits appear on page 213 and constitute an extension of this copyright page.
Design and composition by Forty-Five Degree Design
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, except as permitted under Section 107 or 108 of the 1976 United States Copyright Act, without either the prior written permission of the Publisher, or authorization through payment of the appropriate per-copy fee to the Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923, [phone], fax [phone], or on the web at www.copyright.com . Requests to the Publisher for permission should be addressed to the Permissions Department, John Wiley Sons, Inc., III River Street, Hoboken, NJ 07030, [phone], fax [phone], or online at http://www.wiley.com/go/permissions .
Limit of Liability/Disclaimer of Warranty: While the publisher and the author have used their best efforts in preparing this book, they make no representations or warranties with respect to the accuracy or completeness of the contents of this book and specifically disclaim any implied warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. No warranty may be created or extended by sales representatives or written sales materials. The advice and strategies contained herein may not be suitable for your situation. You should consult with a professional where appropriate. Neither the publisher nor the author shall be liable for any loss of profit or any other commercial damages, including but not limited to special, incidental, consequential, or other damages.
For general information about our other products and services, please contact our Customer Care Department within the United States at [phone], outside the United States at [phone] or fax [phone].
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. For more information about Wiley products, visit our web site at www.wiley.com .
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data:
Riley, Charles A.
Art at Lincoln Center : the public art and List print and poster collections / Charles A. Riley.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-28494-0 (cloth)
1. Public art-New York (State)-New York-Catalogs. 2. Art, Modern-Catalogs. 3. Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts-Art collections-Catalogs. 4. List, Vera-Art collections-Catalogs. 1. Title.
N6535.N5R48 2009
708.147 1-dc22
2008055857
Printed in the United States of America
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
CONTENTS

FOREWORD
INTRODUCTION
ONE A PRIVATE TOUR OF LINCOLN CENTER
Marc Chagall
Jasper Johns
Lee Bontecou
David Smith
Henry Moore
Alexander Calder
TWO THE STORY BEHIND A GREAT ART COLLECTION
David Rockefeller
Philip Johnson
THREE A BRIEF HISTORY OF THE LINCOLN CENTER/LIST ART POSTER AND PRINT PROGRAM
The Screen-Printing Process
Vera List
FOUR CATALOGUE RAISONN OF THE LINCOLN CENTER/LIST ART POSTER AND PRINT PROGRAM
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
PHOTO CREDITS
INDEX
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 raisonn in this book celebrating the fiftieth annivers