Join Landmark West! and DOCOMOMO US/NY Tri-State as art historian and curator Marin R. Sullivan offers a new look at the interrelationship of architecture and sculpture during one of the richest periods of modern design.

The 20 years following the end of WWII marked a profound period of synergy and exchange between sculpture and architecture in the United States. Leading modern architects such as Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen turned to sculptors including Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold, and Isamu Noguchi, to produce site-determined, large-scale commissions tailored for their buildings’ highly visible atriums, lobbies, plazas, and entryways.

These commissions, argues Sullivan—sculptural walls, ceilings, and screens—are not “ornaments” or “room dressing” and should be considered part of the architecture itself. They not only embraced new industrial materials and processes, but demonstrated art’s ability to merge with lived architectural spaces.

Sullivan explores how these sculptural commissions represent an alternate history of midcentury American art. Rather than singular masterworks by lone geniuses, some of the era’s most notable spaces―Philip Johnson’s Four Seasons restaurant in Mies van der Rohe’s Seagram Building, Max Abramovitz’s Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, and Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius’s Pan Am Building―would be diminished without the collaborative efforts of architects and artists, and could not exist anywhere else.

She also tracks the (sometimes distressing) afterlives of these postwar commissions in the decades since their construction.

Marin R. Sullivan is an art historian and curator who consults at numerous museums and arts nonprofits. She is director of the Harry Bertoia Catalogue Raisonné project. Her books include Sculptural Materiality in the Age of Conceptualism and Harry Bertoia: Sculpting Mid-Century Modern Life, as well as the soon-to-be released Alloys: American Sculpture and Architecture at Midcentury. She lives in Chicago.

Alloys: American Sculpture and Architecture at Midcentury is targeted for release March 22. Princeton University Press is offering 30% off through May 31. Use code “SUL30”

Wednesday April 6, 6:00-7:00pm
Virtual lecture
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