Wall repair starts spat over artwork

Sunday, April 27, 2014

NEW YORK - New York’s storied Four Seasons restaurant has for decades harbored one of the city’s more unusual artworks: the largest Pablo Picasso painting in the United States. But a plan to move it has touched off a spat as sharply drawn as the bullfight crowd the canvas depicts.

Pitting a prominent preservation group against an art-loving real-estate magnate, the dispute has unleashed an outcry from culture commentators and a lawsuit featuring dueling squads of art experts.

The building’s owner says Picasso’s Le Tricorne, a 19-by-20-foot painted stage curtain, has to be moved from the restaurant to make way for repairs to the wall behind it.

But the Landmarks Conservancy, a nonprofit that owns the curtain, is suing to stop the move. The group says the wall damage isn’t dire and taking down the brittle curtain could destroy it - and, with it, an integral aspect of the Four Seasons’ land marked interior.

“We’re just trying to do our duty and trying to keep a lovely interior landmark intact,” said Peg Breen, president of the conservancy.

The landlord, RFR Holding Corp., a company co-founded by state Council on the Arts Chairman Aby Rosen, said a structural necessity is being spun into an art crusade.

“This case is not about Picasso,” RFR lawyer Andrew Kratenstein said in court papers. Rather, he wrote, it is about whether an art owner can insist that a private landlord hang a work indefinitely, in spite of the building’s needs. “The answer to that question is plainly no.”

Picasso painted the curtain in 1919 as a set piece for Le Tricorne, a ballet created by the Paris-based Ballet Russes troupe.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 04/27/2014