CULTURE: Writing on the wall
Vivendi, Seagram and the end of empire
One has the impression — but only the impression — that the immediate future of Western art, if it is to have an immediate future, depends on what is done in this country. As dark as the situation still is for us, American painting in its most advanced aspects — that is, American abstract painting — has in the last several years shown here and there a capacity for fresh content that does not seem to be matched either in France or in Great Britain [...] The great art style of any period is that which relates itself to the true insights of its time [...] The conclusion forces itself, much to our own surprise, that the main premises of Western art have at last migrated to the United States, along with the center of production and political power.
— Clement Greenberg, "The Decline of Cubism", Partisan Review, March 1948
What does the end of empire look like? Well, it depends what one means by ‘the end’, because once one has dismissed those obvious telltale signs — barbarian hordes making free within the gates, charred cities and outraged priesthood, that sort of thing — as both too obvious and too late, then signs and portents assume an ever-greater gravity. Rather than consult the augurs or haruspices, however, one can, in this case, just as easily turn to the pages of the New York Times:
Vivendi Universal, the troubled French entertainment conglomerate, said yesterday that it had chosen Christie’s to sell the collection of modern art that adorned the offices and public spaces of the Seagram Building on Park Avenue. But Christie’s is not getting all Vivendi’s business. The company has asked Phillips, de Pury & Luxembourg, the struggling auction house, to sell its collection of about 700 photographs that include seminal works by Edward Steichen, Alfred Stieglitz, Walker Evans and Garry Winogrand [...]
Anita Larsen, a spokeswoman for Vivendi, said she could not estimate the collection’s worth or how much cash the company expected to raise from the auctions. Art experts have estimated the value of the art to be about $15 million.
Sic transit gloria mundi, then, or at any rate, sic transit one of those inherited talismans of imperial ambition that a nation gives away at its peril — all to raise a sum, incidentally, that will hardly constitute a drop in the infinitely leaky bucket of Vivendi’s moribund finances.
Why accord talismanic status to the Seagram Building and its art collection? The answer to that question lies in events that took place in New York City in the mid-1950s. There, Samuel Bronfman, chairman of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons, decided to build a new corporate headquarters at 375 Park Avenue, between 52nd and 53rd Streets. Bronfman, aged 65, had been born aboard the ship on which his Russian-Jewish parents were emigrating to western Canada. After a few false starts, the family established a chain of hotels and bars, and a side-line in prostitution and alcohol sales, the latter of which burgeoned splendidly following the adoption of Prohibition by the United States government in 1919. Sam Bronfman’s links with Meyer Lansky and ‘Lucky’ Luciano did no harm to his the success of his business, either, although he also took the precaution of buying up the respectable old firm of Joseph E. Seagram & Sons in the late 1920s. By the end of Prohibition in 1934, Bronfman’s wealth stood at an estimated $800 million. And by 1954 he felt ready to erect a gleaming monument to these various achievements, in the heart of New York City itself.
When it came to the execution, however, Bronfman had the good sense to take instruction from his Vassar-educated, Left Bank-dwelling daughter, Phyllis Bronfman Lambert, a woman of formidable good taste and determination. It was her idea to seek the help of Philip Johnson, her idea to choose as architect for the project the 68-year old ex-Bauhaus head Mies van der Rohe, probably her persuasiveness that secured from her father a staggering $43 million budget. Yet the result of all of this more than repaid the expenditure. The Seagram Building was as sleekly monumental a structure as modernism had ever produced — with its vastly expensive bronze curtain wall, indeed, more like a huge minimalist sculpture than an actual building — and was the largest building Mies had produced up to that time. Its size made a point, as did the understated opulence of its materials, its utopian modernism and its even lineage as the all-American offspring of wildly successful European immigrants. Endlessly copied — endlessly bastardised in the cheap-and-nasty versions that have since sprung up in half the towns in America, and many beyond — it has never really been equalled as the sort of thing it is. Perhaps this was simply because its construction required more self-confidence, optimism, semi-innocent pride and superabundant cash than anyone else had to offer.
But the building was only half the project, because even as the structure itself was being designed, Mrs Lambert was busy commissioning the art that would be so much a part of its ultimate ambience. And here, too, her taste was definite, informed and very much of its time. By the time the building was finished in 1958-59, she had already secured several masterpieces, all of them with something to say about the visual culture of America at the height of the Cold War. Alfred Barr — director of the Museum of Modern Art, all-purpose arbiter elegantiae and untiring apologist of modernism — helped Mrs Lambert to acquire a 22-foot high painted curtain painted in 1919 by Pablo Picasso for Serge Diaghilev’s ballet Le Tricorne. This important and handsome work was hung between the two rooms of the Four Seasons restaurant, at the top of a low flight of stairs. Visible to anyone who happens to be strolling past along Park Avenue or perhaps lingering in the surprisingly large piazza, the work has been visually part of the building for so long that one can hardly imagine the place without it, although its fragile, provisional, almost improvised charm is almost amusingly at odds with the streamlined monumentality of the building itself. But perhaps that, too, made a point of some sort.
Mrs Lambert acquired a work by Picasso’s fellow expatriate Spaniard Joan Miro and several Rodin scuptures, but much of the rest of her art collection was American — not only American, but drawn from what was already called the New York School of Abstract Expressionists — artists who had drawn inspiration from Picasso and patronage from Alfred Barr and whose work was being celebrated by two great New York-based critics, Meyer Schapiro and Clement Greenberg. Mrs Lambert bought, for instance, Mark Rothko’s Brown and Black in Red (1958), as well as works by Larry Rivers. Being New Yorkers as well as critics, of course, those who thought most seriously about AbEx disagreed furiously with each other about virtually everything. Yet one point of confluence emerged very clearly from the pervasive din of their arguments: that at some point just prior to the Second World War, the baton of cultural hegemony had been passed from tired, soiled, morally-compromised old Europe to an increasingly self-confident United States which was at once unfettered by tradition and unsullied by history, and thus that however much one might admire the achievements of French artists in the recent past, the future of modernism and much else lay with the New World, not the Old. The fact that so many of those involved with American art were first or second-generation immigrants only served to personalise the poignancy of this realisation.
But because art is sufficiently unimportant always to be the handmaiden, however absent-minded or incompetent, of something else, this narrative also had a political dimension. For those who wished to take the Cold War onto the territory of high culture, America’s vibrant art scene could be adduced as proof positive of the utilitarian virtues of individualism, freedom of expression (up to a point), and capitalism — and while the explicit contrast was with the Soviet Union, a degree of implicit contrast with Europe was unavoidable. Sutherland, de Stael, Bacon, Dubuffet, Freud — that was all very well, but the future lay not with figuration, not with even a degree of social criticism, and certainly not with Europe. And if living European artists wanted to matter — well, why not do what Duchamp and Mondrian and Mies himself had done, and come to America? Meanwhile, inspired by the example of Alfred Barr at MoMA, American collections continued to hoover up iconic works of European modernist movements, for all the world as the nouveau riche of an earlier generation had bought up Gainsboroughs and Van Dycks by the yard in the hope of affording their present-day flashness a more impressive lineage.
All of which takes us some little way from the Seagram Building. Of course, the most famous work in the Seagram Collection is, in some sense, the One That Got Away. In 1958, Mrs Lambert persuaded the temperamental, depressive, occasionally brilliant Mark Rothko to sign a contract promising to provide ‘500 to 600 square feet of paintings’ in return for a payment of $35,000. The works were to adorn one of the rooms of the Four Seasons restaurant. In accepting, Rothko was not entirely generous, at least according to his own, later account:
I accepted this assignment with strictly malicious intentions. I hope to ruin the appetite of every son of a bitch who ever eats in that room.
Amid much similar posturing, banal philosophising and general self-importance — for such appear to have been the nature of Rothko’s social and business interactions — Rothko first painted more or less the requisite footage of work on about 40 panels, and then changed his mind, deciding suddenly that he did not want his work to hang in a restaurant patronised by lots of rich capitalists. Today, those forty panels are dispersed. Tate Modern has nine of them, and has created a rather handsome, dark, womb-like room for them; seven are in Japan, thirteen in the US National Gallery in Washington, D.C., and the others remain in the possession of the artists’ children. But even this famous tale can be seen as part of an ongoing story about the nature of cultural freedom in America. In about 1930, in a strange semi-parallel, Mexican muralist and political radical Diego Rivera had been commissioned to create a mural for the new Rockefeller Center in New York City; his insistence on including a small portrait of Lenin led to the commission being cancelled — but no particular diminution in the amount of bourgeois patronage coming his way. In Rothko’s refusal to decorate capitalist leisure spaces, the story more or less repeated itself. The moral? Simply that the US was a country in which high art was a matter of individual free expression, rather than being enslaved to the service of the state. And since this, of course, was exactly the message that very same state was trying to promote in Europe and places farther east, even this particular ‘failure’ could be read as strangely reassuring.
But such heroic tales should not always be recounted in tones of nostalgia, amusement or heavy irony. There is life in the old symbols yet. Last week, United Nations functionaries frantically covered up a tapestry copy of Picasso’s great, impassioned Guernica (a potent example if there ever was one of the force behind some of these cultural transfers) so that the world’s most famous denunciation of the saturation-bombing of innocent civilians would not appear as a backdrop for American officials as they — well, took the next step towards the US-led saturation bombing of innocent civilians. Turn the gods’ faces to the wall so that they see not what we do! Or to put it another way, if the icons of American high modernism seem now to have developed a rich patina of age, caused as much by the burnt offerings of their votaries as by the iconoclasts’ occasional lucky potshot, might this not add to their power?
Obviously so. And indeed, there has been no shortage of voices raised in defence of the integrity of the Seagram Building and its art collection, raised as much in superstitious awe and terror as in rational argument, which is as it ought to be. Mrs Lambert, indeed, has described the sell-off as ‘part of a Greek tragedy’. Yet somehow this does not seem to be quite enough. America’s greatest city, having had its heart ripped out only months ago, seems unable to prevent this relatively minor (and hence eminently preventable) outrage to its history, its uniqueness and its purpose. Instead, we hear the words of a spokesman for the same board that sacked Vivendi’s former chief executive Jean-Marie Messier:
You have to see the collection not on its own but as part of a broader disposal of non-core assets. We have to think of our shareholders.
Vivendi, a French company, acquired Seagram in 2000 for $34 billion. Its debts now stand at something like $18.5 billion, to which the sell-off of the Seagram collection of art and photography is unlikely to contribute more than $30 million at most — in other words, pocket-change, hardly enough to make a difference one way or the other.
Except, of course, at a symbolic level, where the sort of difference it makes is no less palpable for the fact that it doesn't show up on spreadsheets. These are, after all, not happy times for New York in cultural terms — perhaps not happy times for America more generally. To quote the New York Times again,
New York City has seen its rich cultural offerings seriously diminished by a weak economy, a drop in tourism, city budget cuts and a decline in private contributions following the terrorist attacks. Museums, theaters, concert halls, opera companies, public gardens and zoos throughout the five boroughs are cutting performances, exhibitions, days of operation and staff members. This is only the beginning, arts executives say.
Meanwhile, the 'main premises' of Western art, as Clement Greenberg puts it, are no longer to be found in any single imperial centre, elect group or stylistic tendency. The world looks very different now than it did in 1958.
Mrs Lambert is, as ever, brave and right to mention Greek tragedy — that dramatic form so much admired not only by the titanic practitioners of AbEx including Mark Rothko, but also by Clement Greenberg himself, whose self-taught classical Greek was apparently perfectly adequate — not least because as Sam Bronfman's daughter, the ironies of the present situation must be unbearably apparent to her. Sam Bronfman, for all his faults, saw the merit in tradition and in symbols. One of his motives in constructing the Seagram Building was to celebrate the centenary of the Seagram company, through the co-option of whose proud old name he had achieved respectability. In making a building that was not content simply to be large and impressive, but which in itself both evoked and celebrated a certain sort of role both for his company and for the United States, he was perhaps guilty of pride, even hubris — but as the conventions of Greek drama would insist, this is exactly the sort of pride without which greatness is impossible, and even in retrospect there is something intoxicating about it.
Now comes nemesis, in the faintly laughable guise of a giddy little Frenchman, the sacked head of Vivendi, superficially enamoured of a sort of sub-Derrida cartoon vision of American capitalism but hopelessly out of touch with American capitalism's more subtle and silent conventions, who in his brief time as chairman borrowed the Seagram Rothko to put in his $17.5 million Park Avenue flat and then promised it to François Pinault, who by a grotesque coincidence owns Christie's, and will now perhaps bid for the picture at his own auction. The relics are to be stripped from the temple and sent off as prizes to foreign collections. Perhaps in time, the Seagram Building will have become as sobering and evocative a shell as the ruined Pantheon, its bronze linings stripped away, its priesthood dispersed or dead, its story the stuff of legends only dimly recollected by a people who were once proud of their freedom from history. This, I think, is what the end of empire looks like, at least in its early stages — and sadly, I am not sure that the later stages will be any more attractive.
Bunny Smedley, February 11, 2003 04:04 PM