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[[image]] Photos on facing page show maquette (preliminary model)by artist Arshile Gorky for his Newark Airport Administration Building murals series,"Aviation: Evolution of Forms Under Aerodynamic Limitations"(1936). Photos, taken as part of the WPA Federal Art Project, show (above) the west, north and east walls, and (below) the south wall. Photo on this page shows the uncovered and restored 6'5"x10' oil on canvas east wall panel,"Airline Map of the United States," which will be on view at November Newark Museum exhibit. face of the fact that all of the aeronautical symbols and parts shown in these murals were based on specific photographs supplied to Gorky by WPA photographers who documented airport scenes. Six-Year-Long-Rescue These compositional juxtapositions and relationships will be made manifestly clear in the exhibition at the Newark Museum, the result of a six-year-long rescue and documentation operation jointly energized by a visiting curator, the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey, and the Newark Museum. In 1941 the Army Air Force had taken over the jurisdiction of Newark Airport. Between December of 1945 and March of 1948, through long negotiations, the War Assets Administration ended federal control of the port area and turned the administration over to the Port Authority. Late in 1948 Gorky died tragically at the age of 44; the New York art world mourned, by this time having recognized his genius and his contribution to all the modes of modern art. He had by then even been championed by the press, and the Whitney Museum of Modern Art was in the process of organizing a major exhibition under the watchful eye of a former Gorky pupil, Ethel K. Schwabacher. At this point it was discovered that all of Gorky's murals had been destroyed: there was no evidence at the Newark Airport of his work, the World's Fair Aviation Building murals that Gorky had painted in 1939 were gone, and even Ben Marden's Riviera nightclub murals which he had painted for architect Louis Abramson had vanished with the demolition of the Fort lee building for state park land. The only evidence remaining was one mural study in the Museum of Modern Art for the left-hand portion of the north wall of the Newark Airport foyer. In 1972, this author, who was then the curator of the New York University Art Collection, was spurred to initiate a search for the lost murals when she noticed that a small painting in the University collection was identical with a portion of the panel in that gouache sketch at the Museum of Modern Art. As early as 1970 Dorothy Miller, a member of the Art Committee of the Port Authority of New York/New Jersey, had suggested that it might be well for the Authority to inventory the remaining art in its older buildings. Mrs. Miller, the retired curator of the Museum of Modern Art, who had first shown Gorky's mural panel and model in an exhibition in 1936, is the window of Holder Cahill. She had been a friend of Gorky's and was responsible for the Museum's acquisition of a major Gorky painting. She, like Ethel Schwabacher, who wrote the major book on Gorky published by the Whitney Museum in 1957, despaired of ever seeing the murals again and felt the least that could be done was to try to document and preserve anything remaining at the Authority's airports. A file was begun, therefore, by Saul Wenegrat, secretary to the Art Committee and administrator of the architectural services of the Authority. The Search Begins With the cooperation of Daniel Kurshan at the port Authority, this author and he colleague Lawrence Majewski, Director of the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts of NYU, accompanied Saul Wenegrat to Newark to begin the search for the mural. During that initial visit, Wenegrat noted the many art deco details of the "modernistic" building. He therefore sent Stephen (continued on page 24) 1987 metro-Newark! 23
