The towering remnants of the young Empire State Building’s tropical décor, thought to have disappeared decades ago, will be open to the public on May 12. Tefaf Art fair booth at Manhattan’s Park Avenue Armory.Bernard Goldberg Fine Arts gallery These works, two oval murals of a maiden surrounded by a rainbow of flowers and leaves, painted by German-born artist Winold Rice in 1938 for Longchamp’s restaurant at the foot of the Empire State Building. Offers. (Now it’s Starbucks.)
When art and architecture historian C. Ford Pietros first saw the nearly eight-foot-tall mural in New York’s Goldberg Gallery last month, he said, “Oh, my lord.” Petros, who has studied Reese since the 1980s, had previously seen only photographs and sketches of Longchamp’s work, mostly in black and white. “This is a big discovery,” said the historian.
Renate Rice, son of Winold Rice and widow of Jerk, A person who organizes and stores a huge amount of family members archiveconsidered the unsigned painting to be authentic based on archival photographs and sketches and decades of familiarity with the artist’s work. said when he saw them at the Goldberg Gallery, adding that he thought “everything was destroyed” when the Empire State space was remade by the 1960s.
One of the oval long-haired maidens is raising a leopard. They come from his eight sets that Reiss executed for his basement dining area, sometimes called her Salle Abstraite (“abstract room” in French). The whereabouts of the other six are unknown. Rice gave them cryptic titles: Temptation, Contemplation, Liberation, Anticipation, Animation, Charm, Adoration, and Delight. Gallery founder Bernard Goldberg said he believed the panel with the snake was originally called Temptation, and the panel with the leopard was animation. Only one shape (current whereabouts is a mystery) is labeled: Contemplative, a maiden perched on a leaf and staring dreamily into space.
Reiss (pronounced VEE-nold Rice) settled in New York in 1913 at the age of 27 and worked at a frenetic pace during his 50-year career. Renate Reiss said Peatross and she asked each other, “When did that guy go to bed?” He made “portraits, candy boxes, lettering, interiors, illustrations, advertisements, murals, furniture design” and also founded an art school, his son Tjark, an architect, said of Reiss’ death. told researchers in his 1978, 25 years after. Among his portrait sitters were Native Americans such as Langston Hughes and Zora Neale Hurston, Harlem Renaissance leaders, and notable relatives and friends such as the artist Isamu Noguchi. (The family archive also includes Winold’s wife Henriette, an artist, designer and writer; his longtime mistress Erika Roman, artist and modernist; his sculptor brother Hans; and extensive documentation of Chirk’s exploits. are available.)
Pete Roth estimates that in mid-twentieth-century New York, more than 100,000 people “ate, drank, shopped, and entertained” each day in spaces “designed or decorated” by Reese. doing. In his 12 outposts of the Longchamp restaurant chain, Rice offered a landscape that takes diners to the South Seas, 17th-century New He Amsterdam, and futuristic rows of golden skyscrapers. Some furniture survives from his interiors. At TEFAF, Goldberg, who has his 25-year-old gallery specializing in American art and decorative arts, revisited Reiss’ medieval-themed grill in his Manhattan hotel serrated wooden chairs from his room. (price is his $120,000). However, most of Rice’s architectural elements have not been preserved. His only major public display of his art his commissions are still mosaics produced in the 1930s, including tableaux of workers and historical figures. railway terminal at Cincinnati.
It’s unclear how the Empire State Oval (which Goldberg priced in the low seven figures for the pair) was originally rescued from the building’s Longchamp. In the 1960s, the rooms were converted into a Mississippi Riverboat-themed restaurant inspired by Mark his Twain writings. (A meandering staircase that Rice designed for a restaurant withstood Until a few years ago, the space was demolished to make way for Starbucks. )
About 30 years ago, two identical Salle Abstraite murals were auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York. They will reappear in 2020, at New York’s Showplace Auction House ( leopard The piece brought in $2,250 and a snake sold $2,750).
A few months ago, Ken Sims, the 38-year-old director of the Goldberg Gallery, 1stdibs.com, labeled “Monumental Art Deco Painting of a Stylized Woman”. He recognized that they were Longchamp relics and asked his boss, who is 90, to confirm. Goldberg replied, “No questions, yes.” His 1stdibs dealer in Buffalo, New York sold the two murals to Goldberg’s gallery at his mid-five-figure price.Recent Appraisal Reports by Art Experts Betty Krulik We call them “very important”.
In recent years, Riesz has been the subject of a retrospective at Hirschl & Adler. gallery in new york and new york historical society (with catalog D Giles) as well as essay Collection, “Multicultural Modernism of Winold Rice”. His work will be included in a group exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art next year. Dolsky Museum at SUNY New Paltz. Renate Reiss remarks that, surprisingly often, “things you didn’t know survived show up.”
Goldberg said he hopes the six lost ellipses will reappear. Perhaps his TEFAF exhibit at the Armory through May 16 will help identify another unsigned panel that someone is hiding somewhere: when the Longchamp room was dismantled, “I don’t understand how everything was thrown out,” he said. As people walked through the rubble, he said, “Did no one taste? Did no one know what was beautiful?”
