A metal mosaic mural created in 1960 by Greek artist Nikos Bel-Jon and titled “Medical Research Through the Ages” is in the lobby of the former Pfizer headquarters in New York, August 29 , 2024. [Ted Shaffrey/AP Photo]
A mural honoring the ancients and moderns of medicine that has hung in the lobby of Pfizer’s New York City headquarters for more than 60 years could end in pieces if conservators can’t find him a new home in the next few weeks.
“Medical Research Through the Ages,” a large metal and tile mosaic depicting scientists and lab equipment, has been on display through a tall, glass-windowed lobby in the giant’s midtown Manhattan office medicine since the 1960s.
But the building is being gutted and turned into residential apartments, and the new owners have given the mural a move-out date as soon as September 10.
Art conservators and the late artist’s daughters are now scrambling to find a sponsor who can afford the tens of thousands of dollars they estimate it will take to move and restore it to cover, as well as an institution that can present.
“I would like to see it as part of education in the future, whether it’s on a hospital campus as part of a school or college. Or as part of a larger public art program for the citizens of New York City,” said art historian and urban planner Andrew Cronson, one of the people trying to find a new home for the piece.
The 12-meter-wide by 5.5-meter-high mural by Greek-American artist Nikos Bel-Jon was the centerpiece of Pfizer’s world headquarters when the building opened a few blocks from Grand Central Terminal. in 1961, at a time when buildings were bright and large. corporate art projects were symbolic of business success. He died in 1966, leaving behind dozens of large brutalist metal works commissioned by companies and private institutions, many of which are now lost or destroyed.
Bel-Jon, born Nikolaos Fotios Baloyannis in the historic town of Valtesiniko, Arcadia, was born in 1911, studying at the Athens School of Fine Arts in Athens and the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and the Ecole du Louvre in Paris. He emigrated to the USA in 1946.
This undated photo shows Nikos Bel-Jon in his New York Studio on East 72nd Street in front of a model of the large metal mural he built for Pfizer’s world headquarters in 1961. [Rhea Bel-Jon Calkins via AP]
In recent years, Pfizer sold the building – and last year it moved its headquarters to shared office space in a newer building. The company said in an emailed statement that it had determined that the money needed to rebuild, replace and relocate the mural would be spent better on “patient-related priorities.”
The developer who is now turning the building into apartments, Metro Loft, doesn’t want to keep the artwork either, although it has been working with those who are trying to save the piece with help such as allowing art appraisers to enter. The company declined to comment further, but Jack Berman, its director of operations, confirmed in an email that it will have to remove the mural.
Bel-Jon’s youngest daughter, Rhea Bel-Jon Calkins, said they have received some interest from universities that could take the piece, and a Greek cultural group that could raise money for the move. But the removal alone could cost between $20,00 and $50,000, according to estimates cited by Cronson.
If they can’t find a taker right away, the mural won’t end up in a landfill, Bel-Jon Calkins said. But it would have to be broken into pieces – nine metal sections and eight mosaic sections – and moved into storage, perhaps by some of her relatives.
Time is running out. Workers gutting the building have been making tattered carpet, drab office chairs and piles of scrap wood and loading them into garbage trucks.
For the last decades, the metal of the artwork – brushed tin and aluminum panels in the form of laboratory beakers, funnels and flasks, surrounded by symbols, alchemists and scientists – has been gray and white. But Bel-Jon Calkins remembers his original multi-colored lighting scheme.
“As you moved, the color moved with you and changed. So there was a constant energy in the mural that no one has ever been able to achieve,” she said.
Richard McCoy, director of the nonprofit Columbus Landmark Foundation, Indiana, which cares for local buildings and landscapes, said the piece may not have commercial value, describing Bel-Jon as “amazing, but not very famous.”
“But then you realize 20 or 30 years from then how good it was,” he said, adding that it probably deserved to be preservedfor its historical value.
Bel-Jon Calkins keeps track of her father’s 42 large murals in a spreadsheet and on the artist’s website. She said that only about a dozen have been confirmed to exist.
A 3.6-meter metal mosaic depicting saints commissioned by a Greek Orthodox church in San Francisco was destroyed during the Loma Prieta earthquake of 1989. General Motors commissioned a hubcap-shaped metal mural that was larger more than a car for a trade show, but it was confirmed that it was later melted down for scrap.
“It’s the corporations that lost,” she said in a telephone conversation from her home in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. “They valued them enough to commission them but not enough to retain them.” [AP, Kathimerini]
