Taking Down Picasso

Martin Filler - The New York Review of Books

Pablo Picasso's 1919 stage curtain for Le Tricorne, at the Four Seasons Restaurant, New York

Though we are only five weeks into 2014, this is already not a good year for some of New York City’s most beloved artistic grace notes. In early January came the anticipated but nonetheless devastating news that the Museum of Modern Art would indeed raze Tod Williams and Billie Tsien’s adjacent American Folk Art Museum building as part of an expansion scheme by Diller Scofidio + Renfro.

Now, a page-one New York Times article brings us word that the real estate mogul Aby Rosen is planning to remove a historic Picasso stage curtain from the Seagram Building on February 9. The wall-sized, unframed canvas, which Picasso created in 1919 for Sergei Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes production of Le Tricorne, has hung in the Park Avenue office tower’s Four Seasons Restaurant since it opened in 1959. Rosen, a conspicuous collector of high-priced contemporary art whose RFR Holding company and other partners bought the renowned Ludwig Mies van der Rohe–Philip Johnson skyscraper for $375 million in 2000, acquired full ownership of the bronze-clad International Style high-rise last year.

According to the president of the New York Landmarks Conservancy, Peg Breen, moving the delicate, unframed, unstretched Picasso painting could be its death sentence. As Breen said, “One of RFR’s movers told us that no matter how cautious they are, the work is so brittle and fragile that it could, as one of them put it, ‘crack like a potato chip.’” On February 6, the Landmarks Conservancy filed a lawsuit in Manhattan Supreme Court seeking a last-minute injunction to halt the removal.

The endangered work depicts a quintessentially Spanish scene of a bullring viewed by spectators—including four mantilla-draped women, a barefoot boy selling oranges, and a rakishly caped ladies’ man—along an arcaded loggia overlooking the corrida. Nineteen feet high and more or less equally wide, this is Picasso’s largest extant painting except for his monumental antiwar canvas, Guernica (1937), which measures eleven feet five inches high by twenty-five feet six inches wide. 
More