Chicago’s Lost, Altered and Disfigured Public Art, #1

Chicago has an astonishing collection of public art, numbering in the thousands. Stories about our public art objects abound. About some objects and artists little is known. For yet others, the prevailing stories are simply wrong.

When we start telling the stories of our public art, the conversation inevitably turns to art that is gone. Where did it go? Why? 

In some cases, pieces have been dramatically altered. Why? What happened?

This is a bigger conversation than you might think. That’s why this is just the first one on these topics. More will come later.

Before we get started, it’s important to say that I want you to respond to what’s here. If you know something, please do tell me. If you disagree with something I say, go right ahead: disagree. No need to be disagreeable. I highly value civility. So have your civil say in a comment and I’ll try to respond.

That said, let’s ralk about how and why we know what we know.

Repeating myself: I’ve been Executive Director of Public Art Chicago since its beginning several years ago. Public Art Chicago has been working to document the city’s collection of public art. 

We have accumulated quite a database of information on this remarkable city treasure trove. In many instances we’ve gathered in bits and pieces of information that are scattered all over the landscape. We verify what we find and work to make the gathered material into a coherent account. We have gone back to the original commissions, to the newspaper accounts when pieces were unveiled, to artist biographies, to city agencies, to state archives, to university scholars, even to the U.S. military or National Guard (some of our armories have terrific mural or relief art on them). Those are not all of our sources, but you get the idea.

We’ve found that lots of objects have very slim histories or, worse, very wrong histories. We have come up against total lack of information on artists. If those artists are alive, we have interviewed them, often being the first ever to ask them about their artistic selves – and not a few of them have been very touched to be asked.

So let’s start – not at the beginning (where would that be anyway?) but in the middle of things.

Recently I participated in a Facebook conversation about what’s going on or is planned at the Aon Building in our city. Part of the discussion concerned Harry Bertoia’s “Sound Sculpture” at that building.

Harry Bertoia:  The Standard Oil Commission, Amoco/Aon Building

This work has been a particular favorite and a worry of mine for a long time. Five or six years ago I was researching and creating a tour for the Chicago Architecture Center, where I am a docent. The tour, which is still running, is called “Hidden (Mostly Outdoor) Art.” It includes the sculptures on the upper plaza of the Aon Center (formerly known as the Standard Oil Building and Amoco Building):  Richard Hunt’s 1987 Winged Form, Joseph Burlini’s 1986 Reflections, John Kearney’s 1985-1991 Two Deer/The Fawn, and the Harry Bertoia 1975 sound sculpture, a form which he termed a “sonambient.”

As I researched the Bertoia sculpture I became aware that what we see today is a much reduced version of the original commission.

The Bertoia was originally placed in the south lower plaza of what was then the Standard Oil Building. From 1975 until about 1990 It stood in a square reflecting pool and comprised 11 segments of various types and sizes of vertical beryllium copper rods, configured to clang together in the wind, emitting tones.

The sculpture was part of the design of this 1974 building, whose architect was Edward Durell Stone. Not long after the building’s completion, engineers noticed that the 50 inch by 45 inch, 1¼-inch-thick Carrara marble panels that clad the building were warping outward. By 1988 over 30% of them had warped, according to a wonky blog, The Building Failures Forum. Some sources say one or more panels fell. This is technically true, though it probably wasn’t from panel failure. As a Chicago Tribune story from 1988 says:

“In December, 1973, as [Standard Oil Company] was moving into the structure, a 350-pound stone slab plunged from the top of the 1,136-foot-tall building and cut a deep gash in the roof of the Prudential Building annex across the street.

City inspectors blamed the fall on unsecured scaffolding, which they said knocked the panel free. However, officials of the company, which was then known as Standard Oil Co. (Indiana), speculated freezing and thawing worked the piece loose.” (1)

Only the panels on the lower half of the building were warping, by the way. On the upper half the panels were thicker and had survived the prevailing Chicago weather much better. But with an abundance of caution, between 1990 and 1992 Standard Oil replaced the entire façade of the building, not just the lower half of it, at a cost of $80 million, which was half the original cost of the building! To replace the cladding the contractor built what was then the world’s largest scaffolding complex, 83 stories tall. To accommodate the work building management had the Bertoia Sonambient and all of the other art work in the plaza removed and stored.

When the recladding was finished, a total reconfiguration of that south plaza was also completed, replacing the square reflecting pool in which the Bertoia had resided with a round fountain, a sort of miniature of the Buckingham Fountain in Grant Park.

When the Bertoia came back, only six of the 11 segments were placed, but not in the south plaza. Three were installed on the northwest corner of the upper plaza and three on the northeast corner, each in its own much-reduced reflecting pool. Surprisingly, nobody seemed to notice that only 55% of the original had returned.

Over time the two reflecting pools deteriorated, the beryllium copper rods corroded and some bent outward.

Meanwhile, mystery surrounded the missing five segments. Where  were they? Would they come back?

My own curiosity about them led me into some serious detective work. By the time I became interested, the 5 absent segments had been out of sight and mind for over 20 years. I spoke with people at Aon (actually, the Jones Lang LaSalle management people), who professed not to know a thing about them – a curiosity to me, but it later turned out to be honest lack of knowledge.

As it turned out, the story of the missing segments was one of business chaos, bumbling and, ultimately, art market intrigue.

In December, 1998 Standard Oil, now known as Amoco, merged with British Petroleum – BP.  In that year the Amoco Building was sold to the Blackstone Group.

I consulted with a docent colleague who was the lead Amoco attorney on the 1998 building sale. He told me that in all likelihood Amoco lost track of the missing Bertoia sculpture segments. They were stored in one of Amoco’s facilities in Naperville or Lisle. Those suburban buildings were not part of the sale of the Amoco Building to Blackstone. The Naperville/Lisle buildings  remained in the Amoco/BP fold, as did everything in them. The five missing Bertoia artifacts were not specifically enumerated in the BP transaction. But there they were, in those Naperville/Lisle buildings BP acquired from Amoco – and there they remained. In fact, when the Amoco Building sale was drawn up, the sculptures that remained on the Chicago grounds and some other art in the building were not mentioned as assets at all. As one of my sources told me, even up to five years ago the ownership of those on-site art assets was murky.

It began to be evident that the lack of care the Bertoia remnants were receiving was at least in part due to uncertainty of ownership. Over time I rather persistently reminded the management company of the deterioration of the Bertoia sculpture segments on the plaza.
Finally in late 2013 they at least cleaned and polished the sculpture’s rods and partially repaired the reflecting pools, but the bent rods were only cursorily straightened.

In June, 2013 I received an email from a friend telling me that 3 of the missing segments from the Bertoia Standard Oil Commission had resurfaced and were to be auctioned at Wright Auctions in Chicago. I headed over to Wright Auctions on the day of sale, viewed the 3 Sonambients and stayed for the auction. Two of them sold, each for over $300,000. The largest of the 3 remained unsold until the following year, when a private party bought it, valued it at over $1 million, and placed it in the outdoor section of the Peyton Wright Gallery (not related to the Wrights of Wright Auctions) in Santa Fe, NM. It was, unfortunately, severely damaged by a vandal who bent several of the rods almost to the ground. It has since been restored.

Wright Auctions declined to tell me who the seller was at the first auction or at the 2014 auction that included the last two missing segments. The seller, it turns out, was representing BP, which had held onto the missing segments in its facilities in Chicago’s western suburbs. I was able to confirm the hiding place – and probable sellers – of the 5 pieces in conversation with my contact at the Santa Fe gallery.

Remember that Facebook post I talked about earlier? The topic of the Bertoia sculpture came up in that post. The current owners of the Aon Building, the New York-based 601W Companies, were talking about putting an external elevator on the northeast corner of the building, a project that now appears to be moving forward. At the same time, during 2018 they totally remodeled the south lobby of the building. What they have done there has raised lots of concerns.

601W Companies removed a stunning Jaume Plensa work, the 24 gongs and mallets that hung in the Aon Building south lobby at the mezzanine level. Entitled A Day Long . . .,  the work consisted of evenly spaced large brass gongs, each representeing a particular activity at each hour of the day, depicted by a word incised on the gong – such words as Fly, Taste, Dance, Write, Smell, Breathe, Think, Walk, Learn, Hear. The gongs are, as far as we know, not going to be reinstalled. Their ultimate fate is unknown. The two Joe Walters fanciful nature panels, which were at each end of the lobby, are to return, we hear. The Plensa work has been, in a sense, replaced by the art du jour, a digital art panel – as if the city needs another one.

So there we have the sad story of Harry Bertoia’s grand, now disfigured and quite possibly still endangered Chicago work.

Chryssa: Untitled Light Sculpture, 33 West Monroe

The Facebook post also lamented the disappearance of a work by the artist known professionally as Chryssa (full name Chryssa Vardea-Mavromichali). David Fleener of Skidmore Owings Merrill, the design firm for the 33 West Monroe Building, collaborated with Chryssa on Untitled Light Sculpture. In private correspondence with me he said, “I did the working drawings for the sculpture at 33 W (it wasn’t maintained by Draper and Kramer) and I became friends with Chryssa, going on to do more drawings for other sculptures for her and visiting her frequently in New York at her home/studio which I also did the drawings for.” The 29-story 1980 building with the stepped-back top was for a time SOM’s Chicago headquarters. The lower atrium of the building rises over the lobby. When the building opened Chryssa’s 70-foot hanging sculpture, which consisted of six large Ws connected by cables, hung from the top of the atrium.  

According to building management people I spoke to several years ago,  the much-loved kinetic sculpture was taken down and discarded because it had deteriorated beyond repair and was in danger of falling. At present I have no photo of that sculpture.

Henry Moore: Upright Internal/External Form,  3 First National Plaza

Several stories circulated about the disappearance of this large sculpture.
The sculpture resided in the atrium of 3 First National on Madison at Dearborn. It stood in the atrium for 30 years.

The simple story is that when the building was sold to Hearn Company in 2014 the sculpture, which was owned privately (not by the building owner), was not included in the building sale. The owner, a Brit, took it back to England, where it remains today, though its exact location is unknown. The 20-foot sculpture, incidentally, was one of three bronze casts of a much smaller original, a plaster sculpture executed by Moore in 1953. (2) The original resides at the Tate Museum in London, England.

As a side note, accounts of the disappearance of the sculpture that reside (or resided) on the 3 First National Wikipedia page and on Preservation Chicago’s site are inaccurate.

Incidentally, the Moore Large Interior Form in the Art Institute’s North Stanley McCormick Memorial Garden is one of six casts of the “interior” part of UprightInternal/External Form.

Let’s take a little detour. I’ve already mentioned the discarded Chryssa sculpture. Now I want to talk about another sort of necrology. Let me get at it this way.

The Missing Secrest: An Emblem of Disappearance

On the sidewalk at the BMO Harris Bank at 111 West Monroe is a most curious fountain consisting of seven circular forms at various levels, with water gushing from the center of each form. This 1975 fountain is the work of Michigan sculptor Russell Secrest (1935-2010). What we know about Secrest comes almost exclusively from my interviewing his wife, Frances Secrest soon after Russell died.

Ms. Secrest told me that Russell worked in mostly small forms, including a style of mobile particular to him. She termed them “balanced sculptures,” which are kinetic sculptures balanced on a point on a base. She says the fountain commission was arranged between her husband and “Mr. Harris.” It is not clear that any of the founding Harris family would still have been involved with Harris Bank in the 1970s, so it’s likely that Secrest dealt with the CEO of that time.

Whoever was CEO, he and Russell Secrest had previously contracted for another work, a large version of one of his “balanced sculptures,” which occupied the lobby of the 311 West Monroe Building beginning in 1970. Prof. James L. Reidy, in his valuable 1981 book Chicago Sculpture, says of the piece, which was called City in Motion (not a title Reidy seems to have been aware of), that “Secrest reduced the use of material to a minimum while embracing a maximum amount of space. A slender piece of polished brass rises from a pedestal, swirls through space to a height of nearly seven feet, then angles gracefully as it returns to the marble base. Aside from its actual turning by a low-revolution motor, the linear figuration by itself conveys a sense of motion.” (3) At the time 311 West Monroe was Harris Bank’s Operations Center. It’s not clear when Harris Bank exited the building, but the sculpture disappeared as one or another new owner took over the building and reconfigured its lobby, which now contains, yes, a digital wall.

We’ve taken this detour from our more current missing sculpture to strongly suggest that disappearance of art has been going on for along time. I discovered this a few years ago. Let me tell you how.

If you asked me what got me started on trying to document Chicago’s public art, I’d tell you that it was the Mary Gray – Ira Bach book A Guide to Chicago’s Public Sculpture. It’s more complicated than just that, but let’s let it sit there. Anyway, I soon got a copy of James Reidy’s  Chicago Sculpture. One of its features is a set of dot maps at the end of the book, locating the works he mentions in the book.

I decided at one point several years ago to copy those dot maps. I annotated them and headed out to the streets of the Loop to find the art. I recall that I did this in about 2005.

I soon discovered, to my dismay, that the book is a compendium of missing art. So many of the works he had described in 1981 were gone. We won’t enumerate them here, but at some point I’ll think about making a list. I include Secrest’s missing sculpture because one of his pieces still exists in plain sight, but the missing one, just like Chryssa’s work, is symbolic of what too often happens to what we call public art in our city. A fair amount of it is, really, private public art, subject to the whims of whatever owner currently possesses it.

Not to be even more depressing, but let’s look at another sculpture that just plain disappeared. We do know where it is, but we might not ever see it again.

Bela Lyon Pratt: Alexander Hamilton, Grant Park, on Michigan at Monroe Street.

The best-known Alexander Hamilton statue is in Lincoln Park It was recently restored and returned to its pedestal in the greenspace between North Pond and Diversey Harbor, south of West Diversey Parkway between Cannon & Stockton. This is the gold-leaf-plated Hamilton by John Angel (created 1940, installed 1952).

Bela Lyon Pratt (1867-1917), whose best-known Chicago work is his Nathan Hale statue in a small courtyard on Michigan Avenue at Tribune Tower, also created a Hamilton statue. It was placed in 1918 and stood in its own niche on a parapet in Grant Park between Madison and Monroe, facing Michigan Avenue. Your mental picture of the geography will conjure up what’s currently in that space: Millennium Park and the Crown Fountain. When construction began on Millennium Park the Pratt statue was removed.

This statue’s fate is remarkable because the work was commissioned by the Benjamin F. Ferguson Monument Fund. Ferguson died in 1905 and left a fund for the stated purpose of “The erection and maintenance of enduring statuary and monuments, in whole or in part of stone, granite or bronze in the parks, along the boulevards or in other public places.” (4) Ferguson’s gifts specified that the Art Institute of Chicago was to select the subjects of and sites for the statuary and monuments. In the 113 years since the fund’s beginning, only 17 such works have appeared. They include Ivan Mestrovic’s Bowman and Spearman, the Native Americans on horses gating the Congress Parkway just east of Michigan Avenue; Henry Moore’s Nuclear Energy at the University of Chicago; Lorado Taft’s Fountain of Time at Midway Pleasance;and Taft’s Fountain of the Great Lakes, which resides against the west façade of the Art Institute’s Morton Building in the South Stanley McCormick Garden.

Strangely – and controversially – the Art Institute managed, through multiple court actions, to use the capital of the fund (which is, in effect, an endowment) to erect a most odd “monument”: the disingenuously named 1958 Benjamin F. Ferguson Building, which forms the east wall of the North Stanley McCormick Garden. When it came time to move the Bela Pratt Hamilton sculpture out of the way for Millennium Park construction, the Art Institute put it in storage and has stated that it has no plans to show this B. F. Ferguson sculpture in public again. The Chicago Park District has expressed interest in finding another location for the monument, but the funding for such a venture has not been forthcoming. Since the Art Institute manages the Ferguson Fund, its say in the matter probably has precedence.

For a powerful piece of writing on the Art Institute’s management of Ferguson’s gift, I recommend the excellent article by Jeff Huebner in the Chicago Reader of July 10, 1997. It’s entitled “Hearts of Stone”and is one of many long-form articles Huebner wrote for the Reader and other publications back then. He is one of Chicago’s treasures and probably its most knowledgeable public art person. (5)

There’s more to say on missing, lost and altered public art in our city,. Stay tuned for future articles on the topic. Right now, let’s call it a day. Meanwhile, get out there and see some of that public art! If you can find it.

As for the Chryssa sculpture, by the way, I am planning a podcast series that will include a segment on her and on that sculpture. David Fleener. the Skidmore Owings Merrill architect who worked with Chryssa, has offered to join in the conversation about her. Should be fun. We also hope to talk with Ceila Bertoia, Harry Bertoia’s daughter, who heads up the Harry Bertoia Foundation. More to come. Stay tuned.

As I said, if you have comments, please post them below. I’ll answer personally as appropriate. Just remember: be civil.

NOTES

(1) Michael Arndt. Paul Gapp and David Ibata, “Amoco Building May Lose Marble,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1988 
https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1988-03-18-8803010828-story.html 

(2) Alice Correia, ‘Upright Internal/External Form 1952–3 by Henry Moore OM, CH’, catalogue entry, January 2014, in Henry Moore: Sculptural Process and Public Identity, Tate Research Publication, 2015, 
https://www.tate.org.uk/art/research-publications/henry-moore/henry-moore-om-ch-upright-internalexternal-form-r1172240

(3) James L. Reidy, Chicago Sculpture (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1981), p. 103

(4) Bulletin of the Art Institute of Chicago, Volumes VII, No. 2 (October, 1913). p 28. Google e-book, https://bit.ly/2PHfGWQ

(5) Huebner’s article is at https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/hearts-of-stone/Content?oid=893851

© Edmund J. McDevitt
December, 2018