If, while New York power-lunching you overlooked the fact that Jackson Pollock's
Blue Poles and other original art was long gone from the
Four
Seasons Restaurant's famous walls, don't fret. Art dealer Andrew Terner and one of The Four Seasons Restauant's co-proprietors, Alex von Bidder have been giving fine art a comeback stage next to Picasso's enormous Three Cornered Hat curtain that still hangs between the grill and the pool rooms.
Terner has re-installed some of the best of the best including works by Rauschenberg, Warhol, Judd and Dubuffet. Von Bidder said there had always been great art at hanging in the Four Seasons, the space has always been "the ultimate blue-chip gallery."
The two had hoped to win the bid for a loan from the
Tate Modern in London to hang for The Four Seasons' 50th anniversary in 2009. They had intended to finally hang Mark Rothko's originally commissioned murals painted mostly in 1959 for the restaurant space. Rothko, however,
abruptly renegged and
returned The Four Seasons its money, instead donating the collection known as the Seagrams set to London's Tate Modern, an ocean away as a statement against America's elite society.
The
anniversary party took place just recently hosting New York's business and political elite including Henry Kissinger, former mayors Koch and Dinkins, Martha Stewart, Zach Pozen, Liz Smith, Leonard Lauder and dozens of other Park Avenue highflyers, but sadly for the event, no glimpse of any Rothkos.
It has been said that Rothko negotiated heavily upon his donation to the Tate. Perhaps therein lies a clause forever preventing the Seagrams murals to hang on their originally intended walls. This we will never know, but 2009 is also not over yet, so we can hope for a possible New York sensation at the corner of 52nd and Park maybe in months to come.
Nine of Rothko's Seagrams murals are permanently on view in the Rothko room at London's Tate Modern in Southwark. Others live at the Kawamura Memorial Museum in Japan and the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C..
