Wednesday, July 29. 2020 GREAT WPA ART AT TWO AIRPORTS

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ARSHILE GORKY

WEDNESDAY, JULY 29nd, 2020 
OUR 117th ISSUE
OF 
FROM THE ARCHIVES

TAKE A FLIGHT OF ART
FROM
NEWARK 
FROM
LA GUARDIA

NEWARK AIRPORT 
ADMINISTRATION BUILDING

ARSHILE GORKY

MURALS AT NEWARK MUSEUM – NEWARK NJ
ADMINISTRATION BUILDING
NEWARK AIRPORT

Although the modern style of these brightly colored murals made them were not rediscovered until 1973, when they were found beneath fourteen layers of wall paint at the Newark Airport Administration Building.” (www.philamuseum.org) The originals of the two surviving murals are no longer at the airport, but instead are housed at the Newark Museum.

“Aerial Map” “Aerial Map” Project type: Art, Murals New Deal Agencies: Federal Art Project (FAP), Works Progress Administration (WPA) Started: 1935 Completed: 1937 Artists: Arshile Gorky

Arshile] Gorky painted ten large-scale murals on the theme of aviation for the Newark Airport Administration Building. This mural cycle, known as Aviation: Evolution of Forms under Aerodynamic Limitations, was among the first modernist murals created and installed under the aegis of the Works Progress Administration’s (WPA) Federal Art Project.

Although still engaged with the Cubist vocabulary of Picasso and Braque, the mechanized forms of these murals also reveal a debt to the work of Fernand Léger, especially his monumental 1919 painting The City, now in the Museum’s collection. Léger’s urban, machine-inspired imagery and vivid colors were particularly suited to express the spirit of aviation, and Gorky clearly studied The City intensely since his color reproduction of the painting is covered with his paint-smeared fingerprints.

Like most WPA murals, the panels were not made in situ, but rather painted in the studio on monumental canvases that were later installed on the walls at Newark Airport–a practice that was in keeping with Gorky’s belief that ‘mural painting should not become part of the wall, as the moment this occurs the wall is lost and the painting loses its identity.’
highly controversial at the time, these large-scale compositions signaled Gorky’s emergence as an abstract painter of great promise. Sadly, eight of the Newark Airport murals were later lost or destroyed, while the two remaining works, Aerial Map and Mechanics of Flying,

Study for mural for Administration Building, Newark Airport,
New Jersey
Arshile Gorky 1904-1948.

RESTORATION OF THE ADMINISTRATION BUILDING
FROM
UNTAPPED CITIES (C)

Control Tower

Is it possible to have an architecturally significant airport terminal, literally hidden in plain sight? It is, if it’s been picked up and moved a half mile, its original entrance tucked into an internal courtyard, and is forgotten by the public. Such is the understatedly epic story of Building 1, an Art Deco beauty built in 1935 as the original terminal building of what was then Newark Metropolitan Airport. Among its numerous claims to fame: Amelia Earhart, Wiley Post, and Charles Lindbergh all flew in and out of here, including on some record breaking flights. In fact, Newark Airport had the most active landing strip in the United States in the 1920s and ’30s, serving as the East Coast terminus of the Air Mail. Atop Building 1 is one of the first air traffic control centers in the country, and the whole building is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Richard Southwick, Partner and Director of Historic Preservation at Beyer Blinder Belle, who led the adaptive reuse of Building 1 called it his “favorite project overall,” in a recent interview with us, while discussing his many high-profile restorations over the years including the TWA Hotel, Grand Central Terminal, The Frick Collection, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, the New York Botanical Garden, and many more. He calls Building 1, “the first modern terminal anywhere in the nation.” Upon Southwick’s recommendation, we took a visit last week with the Port Authority of New York & New Jersey.

Occupied by the U.S. Army During World War II, by the end the war, the concrete terminal was considered too small for operations. After years of being used by the United State Postal Service for airmail operation, the terminal fell into disuse. More than half a century later, threatened by the extension of a runway, the entire building was cut into thirds and moved half a mile down the airport taxiway in 1999. It was one of the largest ever building moves undertaken historically in the United States and the adaptive reuse effort saved the building from demolition. The building was seamed back together — you can still see where this was done on the exterior and interior — and expanded with a 70,000 square foot new addition that tripled the size of the building..

Today, it is home to the Port Authority Police Department, airport administration offices, an operations center, and rescue and firefighting departments. The sense of history is palpable throughout the building, going beyond the architecture itself, from historic exhibitions on the ground floor to a restored captain’s quarters on the second floor.

Two of ten original WPA murals by Arshile Gorky from the series “Aviation: Evolution of Forms under Aerodynamic Limitations,” were uncovered in the restoration process, and reproductions are on display on the second floor (the originals are in the Newark Museum). Originally planned for Brooklyn’s Floyd Bennett Field, another historic flight facility in the New York City area, Gorky was reassigned by the Works Progress Administration to Newark Airport where he completed the paintings in 1937.

The former main entrance of the terminal looks plucked straight out of Miami Beach, featuring a semi-circular entrance canopy with Art Deco lettering. Aluminum grillwork showing seagulls in flight sits above the three-section entranceway. The revolving door is enclosed on the sides to further emphasize the verticality of the Art Deco design of the building. The entrance overhang extends beyond other smaller semi-circular elements — the revolving door, the air traffic control tower, the bowed windows on the second floor — throughout the central part of the facade. The first floor begins six steps above ground level, with semi-circular steps leading up to the entrance. Two wings come off of this central block, “bent back from the air-field elevation as if in flight,” according to the description in the nomination form for the building in the National Register for Historic Places.

The 80-foot long main concourse, now the entrance lobby to the building, originally provided access to interior corridors which led to waiting rooms. The walls and columns are faced with polished marble, and bird wings made of plaster come off the top of the columns. According to the National Register for Historic Places, “The design incorporated large areas of glass and contained an interior of fanciful, yet restrained decoration which relied heavily on geometric motifs which were interspersed with references to the theme of flight.” When the building was added to the National Register of Historic Places, much of the original lobby walls was covered in sheetrock and the original lighting fixtures and grillwork were missing, but the terrazzo floor and ceilings were still in place.

The lobby of Building 1 is open to the public, though this is a generally little known fact. Southwick concludes about this very unique adaptive reuse project: “There was a little bit of everything: new construction, old construction, interpretation, historic exhibits, moving the building which is one of the tools in our preservation toolbox. [It was] the biggest move of its type in the history of the country. And it’s open to the public!” Here is a look at the historic exhibitions you can see:

Reproduction of Gorky mural “Flight” on display now.

MARINE AIR TERMINAL

LA GUARDIA AIRPORT

• 

• 

SEAPLANE DOCKED BY THE PIER AT THE TERMINAL
FAMOUS PAN AM CLIPPERS DEPARTED FROM THIS TERMINAL

“FLIGHT” MURAL BY JAMES BROOKS
1941-1942

Fiorello LaGuardia bust in restored entry
of Terminal
EXCERPT FROM THE GUGGENHEIM ON-LINE RESOURCES:

JAMES BROOKS

D. 1992, NEW YORK CITY
B. 1906, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI;

James Brooks was born on October 18, 1906, in Saint Louis, Missouri, and moved with his family to Dallas in 1916. He studied art at Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and, after moving to New York in 1926, took night classes at the Art Students League. Like many other Abstract Expressionists, Brooks painted murals for the Works Progress Administration (WPA) Federal Art Project in the late 1930s and early 1940s. His best-known project was a mural titled Flight (1940–42) at the International Marine Terminal building at LaGuardia Airport. This vibrant, monumental work—the largest of the WPA murals—measures 12 feet high and 237 feet long and depicts the history of flying, from early mythology to the latest innovations, in a clean,social Realist style. From 1942 to 1945.

Brooks served as a combat artist with the U.S. Army in the Middle East and returned to New York in 1946, at the height of what would later be termed the Abstract Expressionist movement. An inveterate risk taker, he soon abandoned figuration for abstraction. He reconnected with Jackson Pollock, a friend from the WPA days. Brooks not only took over their Eighth Street studio when Pollock and his wife, artist Lee Krasner, moved to Long Island, but also credited Pollock with encouraging him to try a more gestural style. During the late 1940s, Brooks’s aesthetic evolved from a loose derivation of Cubism to a moodier, more atmospheric style. In the summer of 1947, Brooks had a breakthrough. He was painting on paper, and glued the paper onto heavy cloth for archival purposes. He noticed that the paste he used to attach the paper to the cloth bled through to the side he was painting on. From then on he would start by working on the cloth and then switch to the front of the painting, combining accidents with deliberate choices in an approach that he used for several years. In the 1960s, Brooks shifted styles again, building compositions out of larger, bolder, and simpler forms. Brooks had his first solo show at the Peridot Gallery, New York (1949), and continued to show regularly in New York galleries over the next 30 years.

In 1963, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, mounted a retrospective that traveled to the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, Massachusetts; Baltimore Museum of Art; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Washington Gallery of Modern Art, Washington, D.C.; and University of California Art Galleries, Los Angeles. In 1975, Martha Jackson Gallery and Finch College Museum of Art, New York, jointly organized a retrospective that traveled to Guild Hall Museum, East Hampton, New York; Flint Institute of Arts, Grand Rapids Art Museum, and Cranbrook Art Museum, Bloomfield Hills, all Michigan; and University of Connecticut, Storrs. Another retrospective was shown at the Portland Museum of Art, Maine (1983). Among major group exhibitions, his work was featured in the Whitney Annual (later the Whitney Biennial), New York (1950, 1951, 1953–55, 1957–59, 1963, 1967); 12 Americans at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1956); and Documenta, Kassel, West Germany (1959). He received a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship (1969). Brooks died on March 9, 1992, in East Hampton.

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EDITORIAL
 Two airports, both from the 1930’s and cherishing a small piece of history at each one.  Hopefully, the Newark facility will again be open to the public at some time.  Thanks to our friends at UNTAPPED CITIES for the wonderful piece on  Newark Airport Administration Building. 

At this time I may just book a trip to Buffalo to see the Marine Air Terminal (It is in NY and I won’t have to quarantine and Jet Blue flies there!) 

 JUDITH BERDY

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Text by Judith Berdy
Thanks to Bobbie Slonevsky for her dedication to Blackwell’s Almanac and the RIHS
Thanks to Deborah Dorff for maintaining our website
Edited by Deborah Dorff


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