When I was a kid (though not a mere child), I defended Edward Durell Stone’s much maligned Gallery of Modern Art at 2 Columbus Circle when it opened in 1964. It had that recherché white marble cladding with an arcade and loggia outside, and rich walnut and macassar ebony paneling within. Thick, jungle-red-carpeted stairs took you up to intimate galleries at half-levels, where a soigné and surreal art collection, including Gustave Moreau’s Salome Dancing Before Herod (1874–76), awaited. At the top of the museum was the Gauguin Room, with tapestries à la Gauguin, where you could dine on (then) rare Polynesian cuisine in a grasscloth-lined Modernesque setting overlooking Central Park. You would hardly notice the dreary Coliseum to the west, where the Time Warner Center looms today.
At the time, an older, wiser architect tried to explain the errors of my judgment: The monument to Huntington Hartford’s hothouse nonabstract art collection just “didn’t work.” My point about the gallery being designed by the same architect as the venerated Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) didn’t fly. In the years between MoMA (1939) and the Gallery of Modern Art, Ed Stone had gone over to the dark side. Proving I was ultra-naive was Ada Louise Huxtable’s pronouncement in The New York Times that it was a “die-cut Venetian palazzo on lollipops.”
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