Rockefeller Center

Rockefeller Center
Originally uploaded by Martin Fossum

Rockefeller Center or Rockefeller Plaza is a complex of 19 commercial buildings covering 22 acres between 48th and 51st streets in New York City, says Wikipedia.

Built by the Rockefeller family, it is located in the center of Midtown Manhattan, spanning the area between Fifth Avenue and Sixth Avenue. It was declared a National Historic Landmark in 1987.[2][3][4]

It was the largest private building project ever undertaken in modern times.[7] Construction of the 14 buildings in the Art Deco style (without the original opera house proposal) began in 1930 - despite the economic crash and the Great Depression - and was completed in 1939.

Rockefeller Center represents a turning point in the history of architectural sculpture: it is among the last major building projects in the United States to incorporate a program of integrated public art.

Paul Manship's highly recognizable bronze gilded statue of the Greek legend of the Titan Prometheus recumbent, bringing fire to mankind, features prominently in the sunken plaza at the front of 30 Rockefeller Plaza.

A large number of other artists contributed work at the Center, including Isamu Noguchi, whose gleaming stainless steel bas-relief, News, over the main entrance to 50 Rockefeller Plaza, was a standout. Other artists included Carl Milles, Hildreth Meiere, Margaret Bourke-White, Dean Cornwell, and Leo Friedlander.

In 1932, the Mexican socialist artist Diego Rivera (whose sponsor was Museum of Modern Art and whose patron at the time was Abby Aldrich Rockefeller, the wife of John D. Rockefeller, Jr.), was commissioned by their son Nelson Rockefeller to create a color fresco for the 1,071-square-foot (99 m2) wall in the lobby of the then RCA Building.

This was after Nelson had been unable to secure the commissioning of either Matisse or Picasso. Previously he had painted a controversial fresco in Detroit entitled Detroit Industry, commissioned by Abby and John's friend, Edsel Ford, who later became a MoMA trustee.

Thus it came as no real surprise when Rivera's Man at the Crossroads became controversial, as it contained Moscow May Day scenes and a clear portrait of Lenin, not apparent in initial sketches. After Nelson issued a written warning to Rivera to replace the offending figure with an anonymous face, Rivera refused (after offering to counterbalance Lenin with a portrait of Lincoln), and so he was paid off and the mural papered over at the instigation of Nelson, who was to become the Center's flamboyant president.

Nine months later, after all attempts to save the fresco were explored—including relocating it to Abby's Museum of Modern Art—it was destroyed as a last option.[16] (Rivera re-created the work later in Mexico City in modified form, from photos taken by an assistant, Lucienne Bloch.)

Rivera's fresco in the Center was replaced with a stunning, larger mural by the Spanish Catalan artist Josep Maria Sert, titled American Progress, depicting a vast allegorical scene of men constructing modern America. It contains the figures of Abraham Lincoln, Mahatma Gandhi and Ralph Waldo Emerson, and it is wrapped around the west wall of the Grand Lobby at 30 Rock.[17]