Tuesday, July 11, 2020 – ROBERT GOLDWATER ART HISTORIAN

By admin

TUESDAY,  AUGUST 11th,  2020

The

127th  Edition

From Our Archives

Robert Goldwater
Louise Bourgeois
and the 

Roosevelt Island Connection

Guest Author:
Stephen Blank

Giant spiders and Roosevelt Island!

Well, not exactly. But there is a connection. Perhaps you have seen the work of the artist Louise Bourgeois. She’s world famous for her sculpture and paintings, but most of all she is known for her spiders – especially the very big ones.

Louise Bourgeois, sculpture, Maman. Bourgeois in the 1950s was a member of the American Abstract Artists Group along with Barnett Newman and Ad Reinhardt. She was friends with the artists Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. But her work transcended even contemporary categories. As she said, “I have met important figures from this century’s art: Brancusi, Léger… I have lived next to the most radical art movements, but I have always tried to make art that was my own.” (And, by the way, you can visit her home and studio downtown, precisely as it was when she left it at her death in 2010.)

Ah yes, but Roosevelt Island.

Well, in 1936, Bourgeois had opened a print shop beside her father’s tapestry gallery, and one day Robert Goldwater walked in, bought a couple of Picasso prints from her and, as she put it: “In between talks about surrealism and the latest trends, we got married.” Goldwater, a young American academic, turns out to be an interesting and soon to be influential guy.

As war clouds rose in Europe, the couple moved to New York City, where Goldwater taught in New York University’s Institute of Fine Arts and Bourgeois attended the Art Students League of New York,

Goldwater was one of the first art history students to study modern art when the subject was not considered worthy of serious graduate research. His doctoral dissertation at NYU dealt with “primitivism” and Modern art. A year later, a revised version of his dissertation appeared as Primitivism in Modern Painting, a pioneering and now classic study that examines the relationship between tribal arts and 20th-century painting. His analysis, we are told, distinguishes the romanticism of Gauguin; an emotional primitivism exemplified by the Brücke and Blaue Reiter groups in Germany; the intellectual primitivism of Picasso and Modigliani; and a “primitivism of the subconscious” in Miró, Klee, and Dali.

Later, after establishing himself as one of our leading authorities in the study of modern Western art, Goldwater became a scholar and connoisseur of the art of Africa. In the sixties, he published monographs on “Bambara Sculpture from the Western Sudan” and “Senufo Sculpture From West Africa” in addition to books on modern sculpture and surrealism.

In 1957 he became a full professor of art history at NYU, and in the same year became the first director of the Museum of Primitive Art, founded by Nelson A. Rockefeller and derived in part from Rockefeller’s personal collection. Goldwater organized the first exhibition of African art by a New York museum, which opened in 1957 in a town house on West 54th Street. In 1969, Rockefeller offered the entire Museum of Primitive Art collection to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which established a curatorial department for the care, study and exhibition of the works. A new wing was proposed, to be named in honor of Rockefeller’s son Michael who disappeared in 1961 during an expedition in New Guinea. Goldwater served as Consultative Chairman of the Metropolitan Museum’s Department of Primitive Art from 1971 until his death. The wing, which contains both the Metropolitan Museum’s existing holdings with those of the Primitive Museum’s former holdings, opened to the public in January 1982. The departmental library was renamed the Robert Goldwater Library in Goldwater’s memory.

Bourgeois and Goldwater lived among entered the innermost circles of the period’s advanced culture in New York and abroad, surrounded by writers, scholars, critics and curators.

Louise and Robert Goldwater in Long Island, 1984.

Courtesy Fondazione Prada

But what about Roosevelt Island? Ah yes. Well, the name “Goldwater” is the clue. Robert Goldwater’s father was Dr. Sigmund Schultz Goldwater, City Commissioner for Hospitals in New York from 1934 to 1940. Dr. Goldwater played a significant role in the modernization of the New York City hospital system. At his death, Mayor Fiorello LaGuardia stated, “For him was due the credit for the rehabilitation of the hospital system of the City of New York. He was a great force for progressive medicine and the outstanding authority on hospital construction.”

Earlier, Goldwater had served a NYC Commission of Health. He was also a registered architect and an honorary member of the American Institutes for Architects. He served as a consulting expert to the US Public Health Service and to the Institute of Experimental Medicine in Leningrad, in the USSR. At his death he was advisory construction expert for 156 hospitals in the United States, Canada, Newfoundland and British Columbia.

So here is where the story has led. In 1939, the Welfare Island Hospital for Chronic Diseases opened, as a nursing, chronic care, and rehabilitative facility with 986 beds, replacing the Blackwell Island penitentiary. Designed by Isadore Rosenfield, Butler & Kohn, and York & Sawyer under Goldwater’s oversight, the hospital was known for its modern structure and facilities. It was renamed Goldwater Memorial Hospital in honor of Dr. S. S. Goldwater.

Hang on. There’s a little more. Before the hospital’s construction, Goldwater and Parks Commissioner Robert Moses debated intensely on how to use the land throughout the island. Moses wanted to tear down everything that remained on the island, and make a great public park here. Goldwater wanted a hospital park. Since Moses, however, had already opened parks on Randall’s and Wards Islands, the scale tipped in Goldwater’s favor. Dr. Goldwater originally planned to build seven modern medical facilities. Only a Nurse’s Residence (built in 1938, north of the current subway station) and this hospital materialized, while all other construction was postponed by World War II. Bird S. Coler Hospital opened in 1952, the last of the pre-Roosevelt Island constructions.

So there we are – giant spiders and Roosevelt Island. Check under your bed. You never know.

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EDITORIAL

Thanks to Stephen Blank for today’s article on Robert Goldwater.  Fascinating stories seem to come to us so frequently and mysterious questions get answered.

Judith Berdy

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 Melanie Colter  and Deborah Dorff

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